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THE 
BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

The Foundations of Religion 



BY 

WILLIAM F. ROBISON, S.J. 

Professor of Theology, St. Louis University 



B. HERDER BOOK CO. 
17 South Broadway, St. Louis, Mo, 

AND 

68 Great Russell St., London, W. C. 
1918 






ov 



IMPBIMI POTEBT 

A, «/. Burr owes y S.J., 

Praep. Prov. Mo. 
8tL Ludovici, die 15 Septemhris, 1918 

NIHIL OBSTAT 
8ti, Ludovici, die 7 OctdbriSy 1918 

F, a. Holweek, 

Censor Lihrorum 

IMPRIMATUR 

8ti, Ludovici, die 10 Octohris, 1918 

•J* Joannes J. Olennon 
Archiepiscopus 

Sti. Ludovici 



Copyright, 1918, 

hy 

Joseph Chummerslach 

All rights reserved 
Printed in U. 8. A, 



VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY 
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JAN -4 !9I9 
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TO 

MY COUNTRY'S PATRONESS 

MARY IMMACULATE 



FOREWORD 

The present work concludes tlie line of 
thought set forth in the two companion vol- 
umes, Christ^s Masterpiece and '^His Only 
Son/' Combined, the three courses of lec- 
tures, which are given to the public in the 
form in which they were delivered as Lenten 
Lectures in St. Francis Xavier (College) 
Church, form a compendious exposition of 
Christian apologetics. 

It is a remarkable fact that many of the 
religious errors of today, as well as of the 
past, are due in great part to false philo- 
sophical principles. This fact emphasizes 
the importance of the considerations 
herewith presented, wherein the rational 
grounds of religion are established. True 
religion presupposes sound philosophy: re- 
vealed religion is built on the foundation of 
natural religion: the necessity of Cath- 
olicity, as Christianity in the concrete, rests 
on the necessity of religion in general. 



FOREWORD 

Here, as elsewhere, grace neither destroys 
nor neglects nature, but completes and per- 
fects it. 

It is hoped that the reflections set forth in 
these discourses will be of use as an antidote 
to the poison of irreligion, which is often 
masked under the guise of pretentious 
erudition and deceives the unwary or the 
self-conceited by the glamor of a false 
science. 

Recognized theological and philosophical 
treatises have afforded the basis of thought 
for these lectures. Besides, recourse has 
been had to special articles in the Catholic 
Encyclopedia and the Dictionnaire Apolo- 
getique and such like sources. To all of 
these acknowledgment is made. Solidity 
with truth, rather than originality as to 
matter or method or presentation has been 
the aim of the author. After all, it is ^^the 
truth which shall make men free." ^ 

William F. Robison, S.J. 
St. Louis University, 
Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, 
September 8th, 1918. 

iJohn VIII, 32. 



CONTENTS 
Foreword 



LECTURE I 

THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT PA6E 

Nature and division of apologetics reviewed. 
Necessity of religion in general the subject 
matter of this course. Importance of in- 
quiry. What is religion? False definitions. 
Correct notion as derived from fundamental 
fact : free dependence of man on God. Uni- 
versality of fact of religion among all na- 
tions. False systems of explanation: anim- 
ism ; magic ; worship of stars ; social instinct. 
False theories cannot explain fact. Theism 
does explain : hence worthy of consideration 
even before objective truth is proved. Bene- 
fits of religion to mankind: civilization and 
culture; high ideals; respect for authority; 
patriotism. Effects of decline of religion in 
past; at present. Religion cannot fail. . . 1 

LECTURE II 

ALPHA AND OMEGA 

Truth of theism with its consequences to be es- 
tablished. Consent of mankind first proof 
of God's existence. Can God be known? 
Two kinds of knowledge of God. Atheists: 



CONTENTS 

PAOB 

practical; theoretical. Position of agnos- 
tics; sensists; Kant; modernists. Philoso- 
phy of common sense stands. Can know 
very much about God: can prove His exist- 
ence. Traditional proofs: from contingent 
and caused to necessary and self-existent. 
Personality shown a priori; a posteriori from 
order. Internal finality. Its denial counter 
to good sense, to sound science, to sane phi- 
losophy. Reduction to self-evident princi- 
ples. God the source of all worth : His sub- 
limity 36 

LECTURE III 

THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 

Development of true notion of God. Life and 
liberty not incompatible with changelessness. 
Omnipotent: provident: just and merciful: 
infinitely happy. False views. Materialism 
contradictory. Pantheism : realistic ; ideal- 
istic. Appeal to modem mind. Results: 
destruction of idea of God ; death-knell of re- 
ligion. Other variations of pantheism. 
Problem of evil in world. Moral evil pre- 
supposes God. Physical evil under God's 
providence tends to higher good. Value of 
pain. Christian Science and New Thought: 
subversive of Christianity; essentially pan- 
theistic 71 

LECTURE IV 



Freedom of creative act. End of creation. 
Without intelligent creatures world an insol- 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

uble enigma. Man's nature and dignity the 
other term of relation of religion. Man's 
soul simple and spiritual. Constant change 
in man with subsisting identity. Thought 
proves spirituality: grasps immaterial reali- 
ties; abstract knowledge of material things; 
calculated progress. Man may glory in dig- 
nity. Free will. Opponents. Root of free- 
dom: extent. Ethical argument. Psycho- 
logical proof. More thoroughly realized by 
careful scrutiny. Justification of Christian 
asceticism. Objections: closed system: con- 
servation of energy 105 

LECTURE V 

THE BOND BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH 

Proper for man to profess religion. Must he do 
it? Meaning of moral law. It exists. 
False theories. Kant: divorce of religion 
from morality. Moral Evolution. Its su- 
preme canon specified in its ^'pentalogue." 
Five gratuitous assumptions. Consequences 
of system. The truth. Outline. Direction 
to end: irrational beings: reasonable crea- 
tures. God's manifested will the reason of 
obligation. To break this moral bond is to 
bind self in chains of slavery 140 

LECTURE VI 

THE SANCTION UNTO EVERLASTING 

Summary of foregoing. Sanction necessary for 
effective law. Universality of notion of sanc- 
tion. Some sanction in this life. Not suf- 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

ficient. Hence complete in future life. 
Man's soul immortal. Spurious proofs of 
spiritualists. Desire of perfect happiness. 
No ' ' conditioned immortality. ' ' Heaven and 
hell sanction as to good and evil. Both eter- 
nal. No difficulty as to first. Reason de- 
fends teaching of revelation as to eternal ret- 
ribution. Sufficient sanction : probation 
fixed with life. Objections: God's justice: 
His goodness. *^De profundis" **Sursum 
corda" 173 



THE 
BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

LECTUEE I 

THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 

Nature and division of apologetics reviewed. Neces- 
sity of religion in general the subject matter of 
this course. Importance of inquiry. What is re- 
ligion? False definitions. Correct notion as de- 
rived from fundamental fact : free dependence of 
man on God. Universality of fact of religion 
among all nations. False systems of explana- 
tion : animism ; magic ; worship of stars ; social in- 
stinct. False theories cannot explain fact. The- 
ism does explain: hence worthy of consideration, 
even before objective truth is proved. Benefits of 
religion to mankind: civilization and culture; 
high ideals; respect for authority; patriotism. 
Effects of decline of religion ixi past; at present. 
Religion cannot fail. 

It is of untold advantage in warfare to 
know the tactics of the enemy and the objec- 
tive towards which his attacks are chiefly 



2 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

directed; for the defense is then surer and 
more effective than it would be in ignorance 
of the methods or the purpose of the foe. 
This is a fact trumpeted throughout the 
whole of the battle-scarred world : the same 
fact is true in the conflict waged for the safe- 
guard of what is dearer to us than life it- 
self, the blessed faith for which the loved 
Christ died. Different in different ages 
have been the onslaughts on truth by its 
ruthless enemies; manifold, the diverse on- 
sets of "the gates of hell'^ against the 
Church the Master builded: but in these 
later years the hostile aggression has been 
against the very groundwork of faith 
through assaults upon the foundations of 
revealed religion. 

Now, where the attack rages, there must 
our defense be turned ; we must even carry 
the war into the enemy's country. Fight 
the foe we must with the might of the spirit 
and the arms of truth, but with the fulness 
of love warming our hearts for the erring 
ones who are wretched in their ignorance. 
This defense and this enlightening charity 
are the reasons for what is called ^^apolo- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 3 

getics.'^ Some parts of apologetics have 
been the object of former considerations: 
another portion of the same will form the 
subject matter of the present course of lec- 
tures. 

It is a repetition of an old and well known 
truth, but it is useful for the clear under- 
standing of the work before us, to remark 
that there are three main divisions in this 
study of apologetics. There are three great 
questions to be asked and answered: first, 
Why must one be a Catholic? second. Why 
must one be a Christian? third, Why must 
a man profess any religion at all ? 

The first question, then, is. Why must I 
be a Catholic? Our investigation of this 
question formed the subject of a previous 
course of lectures.^ We then studied the 
matter, not as doubting our position, not as 
calling in question whether the assent of our 
faith had been well given, but to see more 
clearly how reasonable that assent was and 
is, and besides, to clear the way for honest 
inquirers that they too might come to the 
goal of truth. Now, the answer to the ques- 

1 Cf. Christ's Masterpiece, 



4 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

tion was this, that starting from the assump- 
tion of the exclusive truth of Christianity 
and standing on the immovable foundation 
that Jesus Christ is the authorized legate 
of the Most High and the very Son of the 
Eternal God, true God as well as true man, 
whose revelation must be accepted and 
whose means of salvation must be made use 
of in order to come to the heavenly home 
prepared for His loved ones, we reached the 
conclusion, that, among all that call them- 
selves Christ's Church, the Catholic Church 
alone bears stamped upon her being the 
seals which differentiate Christ's master- 
piece from counterfeit imitations ; that no- 
where but in the Catholic Church is there 
pure and unadulterated Christianity; that 
Catholicity alone is Christ's religion in its 
concrete reality. 

Note that in this inquiry we started with 
the assumption that Jesus Christ is divine 
and that therefore His religion of Christian- 
ity is exclusively true. That assumption 
we had to make good. We had to answer 
the question. Why must one be a Christian^ 
We did answer it in another series of lee- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 5 

tures.^ The answer was this: we must be 
Christians because Christianity is the re- 
ligion revealed by Jesus Christ the Son of 
God. His divinity is the foundation of the 
necessity of His religion, and that divinity 
of His we proved. 

We proved it from the testimony of the 
Church, considered as a great fact in the 
world, with her witness shown to be divine 
by the moral miracle of her existence and 
propagation, quite apart from the record 
of her institution: and her testimony, thus 
ratified from heaven, proclaims the God- 
head of Him whom she venerates as her 
Founder and adores as her God. Further- 
more, the authentic records of the gospel 
history show that Christ most certainly 
claimed to be divine: and that claim is 
worthy of credence because of the character 
of Him who made it; that claim is signed 
with the seal of prophecy and of the 
Father's testimony through miracles, and 
especially through Christ's resurrection 
from the dead. And so, before the human 
lovableness of Christ's humanity, before the 

1 Cf . ''His Only Son." 



6 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

overwhelming grandeur of Christ's divinity 
the soul must be bowed down to be lifted up, 
must humble itself to be exalted. And thus 
the second question was answered. 

But this second question with its answer 
supposes a prior question with its answer. 
In digging down to the foundations of our 
faith we must dig deeper still, until we come 
to ^^The Bedrock of Belief/' — and this is 
the task before us at this stage of our 
apologetic considerations. This is at the 
base of all else. If it is once settled that 
one is bound to profess religion in some 
form, it is quite patent that he must accept 
and practise that religion which God Him- 
self has deigned to reveal and has dignified 
with His sanction. But must a man profess 
any religion at all ? and if so, why 1 

As I remarked before, when treating of 
the reality of Christianity's claim to our 
adherence, ^^to the man who denies or doubts 
the existence of a personal God, beneficent 
and provident; to the man w^ho flouts the 
notion of free will and the obligation of a 
fixed moral law ; to the man who can see no 
farther than the limits of this life, and who 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 7 

says that when a man dies he dies like a 
dog and perishes utterly; to the man who 
laughs at future reward or punishment for 
the deeds done in the days of the flesh/' ^ 
there is no practical utility in speaking of 
the claims of Christianity. With such a 
man one must begin further back. Such a 
one must be brought, if it be possible, to the 
calm and unbiased consideration of the 
truths which underlie the necessity of pro- 
fessing religion in general. 

He must be shown that there is a God, 
who has a provident care over the work of 
His hands; he must be brought to admit 
the fact that man is the creature of this 
Creator and dependent upon his sovereign 
Lord; he must be made to recognize that 
man's spirit is immortal and free, but bound 
by the responsibility that lies upon him from 
the moral law, which holds his will with the 
force of the will of the Almighty; he must 
be led to bow down before the truth that this 
law has a sanction, which none but the om- 
nipotent Creator could give to urge the fal- 
tering will of the free creature to observe the 

1 *'Hid Only Son," p. 6. 



8 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

order which grows out of the essential rela- 
tions of things and is backed up by God 
Himself. All these things are true, and 
they are the answer to the question, the most 
fundamental of all, Why must a man pro- 
fess any religion? This question is the 
most fundamental of all; for beyond it we 
need not and cannot go in an investigation, 
which is strictly and specifically religious. 

The supreme importance of this inquiry 
is evident from the fact, that nowadays so 
many men are infected with the virus of in- 
differentism, whether absolute or more mod- 
erate. In the end both forms come to prac- 
tically the same thing; for the statement, 
made by so many, that ^^one religion is as 
good as another" can have any sense only 
in the case that there is no religion at all 
which is of any value or of any obligation. 
If religion is a necessity, it must be the re- 
ligion which is pleasing to God ; and, as has 
been established before, the only religion 
which is thus completely pleasing to God is 
Christ ^s sacred revelation, safeguarded by 
the Catholic Church. 

We see, then, the immense importance of 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 9 

the present inquiry. So, once again we ask, 
Must a man profess religion 1 And we 
answer, Yes. And why? Because God is 
man^s Creator and demands this submis- 
sion : He holds man to it by the undying law 
which binds man's free responsible will, and 
is backed up by the sanction that is unto 
everlasting. The development of these rea- 
sons will occupy our attention during the 
present course of lectures. 

Let us reflect and let us pray. Prayer 
may well accompany our efforts, — sprayer 
for ourselves and for those who are wander- 
ing in the gleamless night of ignorance, 
whether culpable or inculpable. God grant 
that our reflections and our prayers may 
bring us to a deeper realization of the un- 
shakable soundness of the grounds of our 
faith, and lead to the brightness and warmth 
of the light of truth those who are so 
wretched as not to see ! From the necessity 
of religion in general the path leads direct 
to the blessedness of Christianity : from the 
sacredness of Christ's revelation the way 
leads on safe and sure to Christ's one true 
Catholic Church : from the Catholic Church 



10 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

the road stretches onward, straight and nar- 
row, but unswerving, for those who are truly 
of the Church as well as in it, to the heavenly 
home where the dear Master is waiting to 
bestow on His loved ones the warmest wel- 
come in the gift of His Sacred Heart. 

However, before taking up the funda- 
mental reasons of religion with the proofs 
of their validity, all leading to the truth that 
a man must profess religion in order to be 
a man worthy of himself and of his destiny, 
and in order to fulfill his obligations to God, 
we must have a sufficiently clear notion of 
what religion is. For this reason we shall 
now examine "sl fundamental fact," and 
shall clear the ground for the building of the 
edifice of truth. 

It would indeed be to build upon sand, if 
we were to put forth the reasons for the 
necessity of man's professing religion, un- 
less we had some fairly accurate notion 
about what religion really is. Without 
dwelling upon the verbal definition, which 
in all its forms has the germ-idea of some 
relation to God, the multitude and variety 
of false or incomplete definitions is truly 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 11 

striking. Religion has been called super- 
stition, lamentable error, childish fear, a col- 
lection of scruples based upon illusion, a de- 
struction of the free exercise of man's 
prerogatives: ^ it has been described as ^^a 
determination of man's absolute depend- 
ence,"^ or as ^^ morality touched by emo- 
tion."" Now, the falseness or incomplete- 
ness of these definitions is due in large 
measure to preconceived notions enter- 
tained about the origin and the history of 
religion and to the arbitrary assumptions 
of rationalists and materialistic evolution- 
ists. Let us proceed in a saner manner than 
they have done : let us build upon a funda- 
mental fact^ constant, subject to verifica- 
tion, incontestable and universal, and broad 
and stable enough to give solidity to what 
is based upon it. 

Now, the fact is ^ that whatever has been 
classed as religion among the peoples of the 
world always includes these three elements : 
first, the recognition of a power (or powers) 

1 Spencer, Reinach, etc. 

2 Schopenhauer. 

8 Matthew Arnold. 

4 Cf. Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Study of Religioriy p. 170 flf. 



12 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

not dependent upon man ; secondly, the real- 
ization of man's dependence upon this 
power ; and lastly, an attempt to enter into 
a relation with the same. Hence, as may be 
gathered from this fact, religion is the be- 
lief in a power above and beyond man, with 
regard to which man considers himself de- 
pendent; and this conviction goes forth to 
specific acts of prayer and sacrifice, and 
grows into the ruling of man's life with the 
purpose of establishing favorable communi- 
cation between himself and the power in 
question. In a word, at all times and in all 
places we find a body of doctrinal beliefs, 
largely traditional, which are obligatory ; we 
find a code of rules, imposed upon human 
activities in the name of a superhuman 
power; we find a system of rites and prac- 
tices, destined to establish and regulate 
man's individual and social relations with 
this power. 

And all this grows into homage and wor- 
ship of One greater than man and conceived 
as supreme, under whatever name, whether 
Father, End, Lord, the Strong One, God. 
Men have erred as to the object of their 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 13 

homage; they have split up the Supreme 
One into thousands of deities; they have 
made gods of stocks and stones : but always 
and everywhere they have offered worship 
to the Being or beings whom they conceived 
as supreme, and whether through fear or 
love have shown dependent submission. 

All this comes back to what St. Thomas 
said long ago. He defined religion, on its 
subjective side, as the virtue inclining man 
practically and freely to acknowledge his 
dependence upon God's supreme sover- 
eignty, whether by reverently worshiping 
and serving or by devoutly striving to ad- 
here to God as the principle of his creation 
and the end necessary for his happiness; 
and, on its objective side, as the sum of those 
duties which flow forth from this depend- 
ence and regulate man's individual and 
social efforts to union with God.^ 

Of course, it is not contended that all men 
have had this correct and noble idea of re- 
ligion. The attitude of many of them who 
did not mount so high I have already re- 
ferred to. Their errors I have acknowl- 

^8umma Theol, Ila, Ilae, q. 81-86. 



14 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

edged. But the error of mistaking many 
nature-deities for tlie one true God, whilst 
it vitiates religion to a greater or less de- 
gree, does not entirely destroy it. There 
only does religion cease utterly, where the 
Supreme One is represented as devoid of all 
personality or consciousness. Pantheism's 
concept of God, as we shall see more fully 
in a later lecture, is the death of religion. 
A pantheistic deity is no more capable of 
awaking the sentiment of religion in man's 
heart and of turning man to the effort of 
homage or propitiation, than ^^the all-per- 
vading ether or the force of gravitation. ' ' ^ 
Religion, then, as is seen from this funda- 
mental fact, is the free dependence of man 
upon God, — a dependence which goes be- 
yond the bare practice of exterior works, 
and is based upon objective and solidly 
established truths. Religion is principally 
a matter of mind and will ; but it is not that 
alone. It embraces the whole of man's be- 
ing ; and that being is not pure spirituality. 
The imagination is stirred by the recogni- 
tion of the unseen world; the emotions are 

1 Cath. Encyc. 9. v. ''Religion/' p. 739. 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 15 

aroused into exercise ; hope flows forth into 
the desire of attainable happiness ; the reali- 
zation of duty performed is as balm to the 
heart; the consciousness of friendship with 
the Supreme One thrills with joy. And 
thus, religion is the perfect goal not only of 
intelligence and will, but of sentiment and 
emotion as well. 

Yet it is by no means a mere sentiment: 
it is not a blind adhesion to truths and prac- 
tices : it is not an instinct which gropes un- 
seeing after an object, unknown and perhaps 
unknowable, — as the agnostics and modern- 
ists would have it. It is the conscious 
recognition of God's supremacy and the free 
acting out in life of the consequences of this 
relationship. 

Now, the same fact which shows us what 
religion is, is remarkable for its universal- 
ity. In the dim ages of the past as far as 
history has been able to shed its light, in the 
brighter days of the present time, there is 
no people of note absolutely devoid of re- 
ligion: men have always acknowledged and 
worshiped some Supreme Being (or be- 
ings), personal and living, whose will 



16 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

founds moral obligation. This is the calm 
and impartial verdict of anthropologists; 
and even rationalists are forced to admit the 
fact, though they try to explain it or explain 
it away by myriad theories. Religion has 
been corrupted or obscured or vitiated 
among many peoples, — I had almost said, 
amongst all that had not God's revelation, 
though we need not dwell upon that ; but it 
has persisted as an historical fact amongst 
all mankind, not sunken to a state of degra- 
dation bordering on brutal savagery or bes- 
tial degeneration. 

Such degradation may, indeed, kill the 
sentiment of religion. It has brought forth 
practical irreligion with practical atheism 
in many, many instances. Nay, every time 
we ourselves turn away from the straight 
path of morality, seek our gratification in 
the byways of sin, or grovel in the depths 
of unmanning transgressions, we hurl 
heavenward an impotent cry of denial and 
we blast ourselves with the lying blasphemy 
that there is no God save our vile desires 
or the objects of our degrading infatuation. 
But down in our heart of hearts we know 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 17 

that it is a lie and a blasphemy. Many too 
who hold the sceptre of sway over peoples 
(and we need not delve into the musty rec- 
ords of the past to prove it) , like Lucifer in 
his pride have exalted themselves above the 
stars and made themselves like the Most 
High. They have labored, and do labor, at 
relegating a forgotten God to the limbo of 
worn-out superstitions. (Italy and France 
and Mexico in their governments have stood 
for that.) But when men or governments 
have been sobered after the dissipation of 
revolt, when they have torn away or have 
been stripped of the blinding bandages of 
unseeing folly, they have acknowledged and 
served and worshiped, — as they have gone 
down to their doom. 

Their knowledge of God and of His 
dominion may have come not only from 
their own reasoning upon the world about 
them, but also, and possibly in the majority 
of cases, from the teachings of parents or 
elders, from authority made venerable by 
immemorial usage, from the observance of 
sacred rites and customs ; but it is there, and 
they worship the Being (or beings) Su- 



18 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

preme, as their first beginning and last end, 
as their Lord and Master. 

These are not groundless assertions : they 
are vouched for by history, and are ac- 
credited by sincere and unbiased study. 
This is the verdict of those who have delved 
deepest into the records of the Indo- 
European races, the Semitic peoples, the 
Egyptians, the Chinese and Japanese. 
This is the unprejudiced judgment of those 
who have investigated the individual and 
national lives of the Australian aborigines, 
the Bantous and Hamites and Pygmies of 
Africa. These peoples have, one and all, a 
religious worship and a system of morality. 
In fact, irreligion with its basic atheism is 
not the product of primitive races : it is the 
offspring of a so-called culture, which is not 
based upon the humility of mind proper to 
true intellectual greatness. The common 
folk never doubt of the necessity of wor- 
ship. They may go astray from the path 
of righteousness; but they do it with their 
eyes wide open. It is only the self-centred 
philosopher who is vanquished by the 
phantoms which he has raised by his subtle 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 19 

difl&culties and who wraps Ms mind in the 
folds of a self-imposed agnosticism. 

I have said that the very notion of re- 
ligion is twisted and perverted by many, 
whose preconceived ideas go so far as to 
falsify facts. The truth of this statement 
is made manifest by the briefest considera- 
tion of their attempted explanations of the 
origin of religion, by a glance at their 
imagined histories of the religious senti- 
ment. Mind, there is question of the ex- 
planation of the fact of the universal re- 
ligious attitude of mankind. But they go 
beyond and behind the fact, and imagine a 
prereligious period from which mankind 
emerged by the process of evolution. 

E. B. Tylor with a great show of erudi- 
tion traces everything back to a develop- 
ment of ^^ animism,'' which he calls ^^a gen- 
eral belief in spiritual beings," according 
to which primitive peoples looked upon 
everything, even stocks and stones, as en- 
dowed with life. From the sight of death, 
from swoons, from the illusions of dreams 
they had come to some notion of a soul, and 
in their ignorance they attributed this soul- 



20 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

idea to inanimate objects, until they came 
to associate mighty spirits with the great 
phenomena of nature and gave homage to 
them. Herbert Spencer concocted a varia- 
tion of this theory by a reference to the 
ghosts of departed ancestors, the worship of 
whom was transferred to an imagined deity. 
J. G. Frazer has his theory about the evolu- 
tion of religion from ^^ magic," which he 
styles "a false science and an art mis- 
carried," or from ^^totemism" with its er- 
roneous interpretations of the laws of 
nature. Again, for many of the Pan- 
Babylonists (M. Mueller with them) the 
starting point is the ^^ worship of the stars" 
with an unseeing groping after the infinite. 
The ^^ social instinct" is the shibboleth of 
sociologists of Durkheim's stamp, and 
largely too of Eeinach, Loisy and the like. 
In their efforts at explanation all of these 
men, whether consciously or unconsciously, 
are guided by their philosophical ideas and 
principles, and for practically all of them 
these ideas and principles are those of 
materialistic evolution. 

Now, quite apart from the falsity of these 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 21 

principles, which are the death-blow to truth 
and the destruction of sound morality, there 
is another defect in them; and this, in a 
scientific theory brought forward to explain 
a fact, is, or should be, the capital sin in 
the eyes of every dyed-in-the-wool scientist : 
and it is this, — these theories do not explain 
the fact. 

The fact to be explained is the universal 
existence of religion, and, since religion is 
the free dependence of man upon God or 
on gods, of theism with theistic morality. 
Neither animism nor magic nor fetishism 
nor totemism nor myths nor superstition 
can adequately explain the recognition of a 
Supreme Being (or beings), whose power 
is over the spirit world, whose sway is above 
the might of magic, whose reverence is older 
than myths and superstitions. What is 
more, from religious history it is commonly 
found that the older forms of a religion are 
more free from the stain of superstition 
than the subsequent forms, — a thing quite 
inexplicable in the theory of evolution. It 
is found that the more of animism and 
magic and the like there is, the less of the 



22 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

sublimity and purity of theism and its 
morality is to be met with, though it should 
be the other way about, if their theory were 
correct. 

No, the theories cannot explain the transi- 
tion from ideas which are non-theistic and 
unmoral, nay, irreligious and immoral, to 
theistic faith and the humble worship of the 
extramundane Being or beings. Much less 
can these theories explain how a large por- 
tion of mankind could rise from the idea of 
polytheism (which gratuitously enough 
they suppose to have been the initial stage 
of religious worship), to the knowledge of 
one only God and to the nobler morality that 
flows from this recognition. 

Whilst these evolutionistic theories do not 
explain the religious fact, theism does ex- 
plain it. Of course, this does not yet stamp 
with the seal of unqualified truth the belief 
in God and the worship which grows out of 
this belief. A theory or a doctrine may ex- 
plain the fact which it undertakes to ex- 
plain, without for that reason being true 
beyond the possibility of error. But, if it 
explains, it is at least worthy of considera- 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 23 

tion. Now, the universal religious senti- 
ment is adequately explained by this, that 
mankind has a confused knowledge of God 
(or gods), which arises almost spontane- 
ously in the mind and urges men on to recog- 
nize their obligation of serving and worship- 
ing, and freely to express their dependence 
upon the superhuman power. 

The idea of God, of which I speak, is not 
the distinct philosophical concept which sees 
that God alone is all that subtle reason can 
prove about Him. It is the vulgar or 
common knowledge of Him, which indeed 
the mind can miss, but which it ordinarily 
grasps with a sureness that is like looking 
upon the light of the sun. Not by intuition 
does the mind grasp God; but it seems to 
find Him ^^by an act of knowledge so rapid 
that it looks almost like an intuition, ' ' ^ and 
knows the obligation of acknowledging Him 
for what He is and of living in accordance 
with this recognition. This vague or con- 
fused and common knowledge of God is cap- 
able of deeper and truer development. So 
too, alas! in men with a twisted mentality 

1 L. de Grandmaison, Recherches, I, 197. 



24 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

and much more in those of a perverted 
morality it can degenerate into the basest of 
superstitions and the foulest perversions of 
mind and heart. 

That theism does explain the fundamental 
religious fact, — this does not, as I have al- 
ready said, prove that theism is objectively 
true. It only shows that it is worthy of 
serious consideration. This is a greal deal 
in itself ; and this is precisely what the self- 
constituted wise ones of a false science will 
not recognize. Yet it is not sufficient for us 
to stop with this recognition of the value of 
theism. We must see whether it is founded 
upon objective reality. Is religion neces- 
sary? and is its necessity demonstrable? 
Is there a God? and is He the Creator of 
man? Is man free? and is he subject to a 
moral law with sufficient sanction? Once 
more, the answer to all these questions is, 
Yes. The proofs of this assertion we shall 
consider in the remaining lectures of this 
course. But right now let us look at what 
religion has done for mankind, and let us 
see what this world would be without this 
free dependence of man upon God. 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 25 

What, then, has religion done for man- 
kind ? It has been the strongest of all levers 
for the uplift of the race. True, in some 
of its more degraded forms religion has 
helped to keep the individual and national 
level low. When indulgence in the basest 
of base inclinations was sanctified under the 
cloak of religious observance ; when vice was 
personified and deified in the gods, it was 
doubly difficult to strip away the mask of 
hypocrisy and by showing vice in all its 
naked hideous deformity to drive men away 
from its prurient vileness. But even in 
these sad circumstances the little good that 
remained was due in largest measure to the 
elements of religion which were not yet de- 
stroyed. And when mankind was blessed 
with the higher types of religious devoted- 
ness, we see religion's beneficent effects 
throughout the broad reaches of the world. 

Only the blindest of the blind can fail to 
see what Christianity has done for mankind, 
where its sacred influence has been pre- 
dominant. The truest culture in the his- 
tory of the world has flowed forth from 
it as from a fountain undefiled. It has safe- 



26 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

guarded the principles of the loftiest moral- 
ity, and has grounded these principles on 
motives of the highest worth. It has been 
the parent of the civilization which is the 
boast and the hope of the world. It brought 
about the recognition of the individual man, 
as worthy of consideration for his personal 
dignity and not merely as a cog in the 
machinery of the State. It set its face 
against the enslavement of man by man and 
and blazed the trail which led to the aboli- 
tion of slavery. It took the wild barbarians 
of the North, who were swept down upon 
southern Europe on a tidal wave of blood, 
and tamed their ferocity. It forced down 
into the depths of their savage consciousness 
respect for the principles of justice and 
honesty and truth and charity. Over and 
over again the work had to be done ; for the 
beast was not tamed in a day: but little by 
little religion led the strong to respect the 
rights of the weak ; it brought the mighty to 
protect the helpless, who before had been 
their legitimate prey. In a word, religion 
in the Christian Church laid the basis 
of Christian civilization and guarded the 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 27 

frontiers against the incursions of the foes 
who would have laid it waste. 

Yes, religion did this ; and religion alone 
could have done it. Eeligion alone can 
keep alive in a people devotion to high 
ideals. Take away the relation of man to 
God (and that is the basis of the religious 
sentiment) , and there is nothing left to keep 
man from sinking down into the depths. 
Public opinion alone will not do : nay, public 
opinion itself slips do^Ti to pagan defile- 
ment, when the soul ceases to look up to God. 
Religion alone can safeguard respect for 
authority; for only religion can forcibly 
hold man's gaze to the will of an Almighty 
Lord, who alone is strong enough to bind the 
free wilfulness of man to the w^ay of duty, 
which is often hard and strewn with the 
thorns of sacrifice. Only religion can make 
the fire of patriotism glow with the fierce- 
ness that will burn up the chaff of selfish- 
ness and fuse the scattered fragments of 
individuality into a solid and compact mass, 
undivided and indivisible. Only religion 
can truly indicate and effectually make 
possible the fulfillment of man's duties re- 



28 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

garding liimself, his family, his neighbors, 
and his country. All this may sound like 
gross exaggeration; but it is the soberest 
truth. 

For, as far as practical consequences go, 
without religion there is no God. True, 
whether God's blessed existence is acknowl- 
edged or not, He does exist in His own 
transcendent majesty. But, unless by re- 
ligion man recognizes the truth of God's 
existence and shapes his life according to 
this tremendous fact, it is as though God did 
not exist; and without God there is no 
virtue, no morality, no obligation. 

No yii'tue; for virtue is the ordering of 
life so as to come to God by the paths which 
lead from uprightness to salvation, — and 
without God there is no uprightness, there 
is no salvation. No morality ; for morality 
is the shaping of one's acti^i-ties according 
to the essential order of things, — and with- 
out God the foundation of this order is 
swept away. No obligation; for obligation 
is the imposition of a moral bond upon the 
will of man by the necessity placed between 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 29 

Ms actions and Ms last end, — and none but 
the infinite God is strong enough to forge 
tMs chain, and none but God can be man's 
last end. With virtue gone, with morality 
a mockery, with obligation a farce what does 
man become? A higher beast, a law unto 
Mmself, — and that means the unfettered 
outlaw. What does the family become? 
A litter and a prison, a stranger to the 
sweetness of true love in its noblest forms 
of self-sacrificing devotedness. What is 
the result in the State? Either the tyran- 
nical oppression of irresponsible absolu- 
tism or the anarchy of each for himself with 
his hand against all men. When religion 
is driven away, she takes with her truth 
and justice and honesty and charit}^, her 
children, and leaves behind her a desert 
waste and a howling wilderness. 

To see more clearly the truth of these 
statements ; to realize that they are not wild 
and incoherent and unfounded assertions, 
look at the world, past and present, where 
the influence of religion has waned, and 
from the dire consequences judge what un- 



30 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

speakable horror would reign, should re- 
ligion be altogether banished from the 
hearts of men. 

First, look at the past. The heart is al- 
most crushed with terror at the picture of 
the ancient world as it was sinking in the 
abyss of evil. The grossest superstition, 
the most unfeeling injustice, the most re- 
volting immorality, the densest spiritual 
ignorance with regard to what is most vital 
for time and eternity, — this is what we see 
as we open the book of history and read the 
record. 

Eome itself, which was practically the 
world at the advent of Christianity, presents 
a picture that is almost like a replica of 
hell. Slavery was the basis of the empire ; 
fear, the bond of union. The oppressed 
sought some vile solace from their killing 
woes in the beastly grovelings of lust. The 
^^ great ones" fed themselves on unre- 
strained panderings to their own evil im- 
pulses, despised their slaves, used or abused 
their equals, courted the greater ones in 
trembling dread. They were lifted up in 
the empty folly of pride to be hurled down 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 31 

to unspeakable and riotous degradation. 
The sweetness of cMldliood was a toy or a 
prey; the sacredness of unstained woman- 
hood was defiled by wantonness, insulted as 
a plaything of passion, debased as a chattel. 
And in the midst of the fierce maelstrom 
of unchecked debauchery woman herself 
shrilled the demoniac laugh of recklessness, 
as she hugged her dishonor to her heart, or 
screamed aloud the shriek of despair amid 
the crash of a dying world. What wonder 
that the people's cries for bread rose to 
clamors for the contests of the arena? 
What wonder that the tiger-thirst, which al- 
ways comes from lust, demanded the bloody 
games of the gladiators and the slaying of 
men ^^to make a Eoman holiday"? Ee- 
ligion was dying, — and behold the chaos! 
If it were dead and gone, who would dare 
to face the dread prospect? 

The darkness of this gruesome picture of 
the days gone by is reflected for the re- 
enforcement of the same lesson of the need 
of religion from the lives of those men and 
women of our own times who are allowing 
the influence of religion on their souls to 



32 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

wane. The wild boasts about ^^ realizing 
oneself'^ and ^^ living one's own life" are the 
exaggerations of an individualism which 
ignores God and His rights. They flow 
forth from the absurdity of a man-made 
system of morality, in which man is always 
master in theory and always slave in fact. 
Too often unreligious governments, which 
aim at making irreligious peoples, counte- 
nance such things as will bring down upon 
them the curse of an outraged Deity. Too 
often individuals, unmindful of their high 
destiny, are lapsing into an irreKgiousness 
which to the thoughtful is ground for ap- 
palling apprehension. 

Alas ! it is all only too real. The mistaken 
notion of a false and wrong independence 
has led to the filthy orgies of ^^free love," 
advocated but too frequently by those very 
ones for whom it spells defilement, — by 
women. There is the pagan propaganda 
for shirking the most sacred obligations 
of marriage by race-suicide and the un- 
hallowed devices for contraception. To 
such a pass have we come, that so-called 
reputable physicians can dare to pose as the 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 33 

masters of human life and the arbiters of 
human destiny without being hounded from 
the habitations of decent men. Associa- 
tions of professional men have the effront- 
ery to urge upon the legislature of State or 
nation the legalizing of the infliction of 
death upon the incompetent or the diseased, 
and to cloak plain murder under the inno- 
cent sounding title of ^^ euthanasia/' Self- 
satisfied ^^scientists'' and ^^philosophers," 
big with pride, can see nothing but the 
doctrine of the progress of mankind by the 
process of a blind evolution, grim as death 
and as pitiless, which shall culminate in the 
unmerciful irresponsibility and the ghastly 
ferocity of the ^^ superman," — a doctrine 
whose logical outcome for the nations is 
voiced in the heathenish motto that ^^ might 
makes right." 

These are terrible symptoms of a deep- 
seated disease, which, if unchecked, would 
lead to the destruction of social life; they 
are the fearful vanguard of an army of 
devastation, which would bring annihilation 
to all that is desirable in the world. The 
victory of such a horde would be the undo- 



34 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

ing of mankind and the degradation of 
man's social relations to ^'tlie law of the 
pack" and ^'the rule of the jungle." 

But that hideous victory will never be 
won. We Catholics know that; because the 
Master promised that the gates of hell shall 
not prevail against His Church.^ All 
Christians know that; because the work of 
Christ cannot fail. All men of true vision 
know that ; because such an event would be 
the frustration of the best leanings of man's 
nobility of nature. Only he who despairs 
of everything of higher worth can from the 
depths of his gloomy pessimism voice the 
statement that religion will pass away from 
earth, close the gates of joy to a suffering 
race, and damn it even to an earthlv hell. 

In brief, then, and by way of recapitula- 
tion, we have looked at the fundamental fact 
of the universal religious sentiment of man- 
kind, and from the study of this fact we 
have seen that religion is the free depend- 
ence of man upon God. The various sys- 
tems of evolutionistic thinkers with their 
parodies of theories cannot explain this 

iCf. Matt. XVI, 18. 



THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT 35 

fact, and hence they are at least useless. 
On the other hand, theism with what it in- 
volves does explain it. This does not yet 
prove that the doctrine of theism is based on 
objective reality; but it does entitle it to the 
grave consideration of thinking men. We 
shall reflect upon the validity of the claims 
of theism and its consequences in the lec- 
tures that follow. For the present we can 
rest with the presentment of religion in its 
larger outlines and in its beneficent effects 
upon the world ; and we can thank God for 
that sacred gift, which has done so much 
for the race of men, and without which this 
old earth of ours would be but a prison- 
house, whose doors would shut out the light 
of gladness and at the end would open only 
to the blackness of despair. 



LECTURE II 

ALPHA AND OMEGA 

Truth of theism with its consequences to be estab- 
lished. Consent of mankind first proof of God's 
existence. Can God be known? Two kinds of 
knowledge of God. Atheists: practical; theo- 
retical. Position of agnostics; sensists; Kant; 
modernists. Philosophy of common sense stands. 
Can know very much about God: can prove His 
existence. Traditional proofs: from contingent 
and caused to necessary and self -existent. Per- 
sonality shown a priori; a posteriori from order. 
Internal finality. Its denial counter to good 
sense, to sound science, to sane philosophy. Re- 
duction to self-evident principles. God the source 
of all worth : His sublimity. 

When one stands looking up at the fall- 
ing waters of Niagara, whirling, tumbling, 
raging with the hoarse rumble of muttered 
thunder and the irresistible might of an un- 
chained tornado, he is overwhelmed with the 
realization of his own helplessness. When 
a man stands on the shore of the ocean, or 
from the deck of a steamer gazes at the un- 

36 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 37 

broken and never-ending vista of the wind- 
swept waves, and lets Ms imagination travel 
on over the miles and miles of watery wastes 
that lie beyond the distant horizon, he 
shrinks into the insignificance of his little- 
ness. When his eyes mount up, up, and still 
up the snowclad heights of sky-piercing 
mountain ranges, or look down into seem- 
ingly bottomless depths of canons, he is 
dwarfed in the presence of magnificent sub- 
limity. When, in the intellectual realm, he 
considers the colossal genius of an Augus- 
tine, a Thomas of Aquin, or any of the many 
other giants of thought, he will, unless 
puffed up with the vanity of imagined im- 
portance, wonder at the height and depth 
and breadth of mental reaches which he can- 
not compass. 

Now, if this is true, how must an honest, 
thinking mind be affected by the considera- 
tion of the ineffable existence and the over- 
powering splendor of God? Yet in the 
humility of soul which is the foundation of 
all true greatness, we must look out over the 
ocean of God's immensity, scan the tran- 
scendent sweep of His magnificence, peer in 



38 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

awed silence into the unsounded depths of 
His being, — not to be crushed, but to be 
lifted up to the real dignity of our human 
nature. 

In the last lecture we studied the funda- 
mental fact of the universal prevalence of 
religion amongst all mankind in all the ages 
of the race. We saw that the various 
theories of evolution are incapable of giving 
a satisfactory explanation of this free de- 
pendence of man upon God, and that theism 
does explain it. We understood that the 
necessity of religion flows forth from the 
doctrine that God exists and is the Lord 
of man, who is His creature, but a creature 
endowed with a free responsible spirit, 
bound by the obligation of a real moral law 
with sanctions sufficient to urge effectively 
to its observance. 

We did not then inquire into the objective 
reality of theism, which is the basis of re- 
ligion. We were satisfied with considering 
some of the benefits, immense and beyond 
the possibihty of exaggeration, which re- 
ligion has brought to mankind. We re- 
flected on what has come to the peoples of 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 39 

the earth from the decline of religion 
amongst them. And from this sad prospect 
it was not hard to see what a universal de- 
luge of despair and crushing woe would 
come to the races of men, if religion's bene- 
ficent influence were utterly to disappear 
from the face of the earth. But we must 
now begin to consider the objective reality 
of the truths which underlie the universal 
religious sentiment. In the remaining 
lectures of this course we are to ponder on 
the solid foundations of these doctrines, 
which are ^^The Bedrock of Belief." Let 
us begin with the existence of God, who is 
^^ Alpha and Omega," the beginning and the 
end of all things. 

We say that man is bound to profess re- 
ligion because, to begin with, God exists. 
Now, what is the value of this statement? 
Does God exist? The universality of the 
conviction of mankind, as manifested by the 
prevalence of the rehgious sentiment, is 
already strong and conclusive evidence for 
the validity of the assertion that He does. 
For, to doubt or deny a conclusion at wliich 
practically all men in the most divers cir- 



40 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

cumstances and through all ages have ar- 
rived, is to reject the capacity of the human 
mind to attain any truth. This is only an- 
other manner of saying what is expressed 
in a homely way by the words of Lincoln: 
^^Tou can fool some of the people all the 
time, and all the people some of the time; 
but you can't fool all the people all the 
time. ' ' 

This consent of mankind, which the 
rationalists and evolutionists must admit, 
even whilst they call it delusion or supersti- 
tion or the result of trickery, is clear evi- 
dence that the reasons for God's existence 
are perfectly satisfying and completely 
adequate to support the superstructure of 
belief. The solid arguments on which the 
consensus of men in acknowledging God's 
existence is based, are not always grasped 
in the fulness of their metaphysical sub- 
tlety; but they are easily apprehended in 
the sane processes of common sense. 

We have asked. Are the reasons for belief 
in God sound? are the proofs of His exist- 
ence valid? The pragmatists (and the 
modernists are practically at one with them 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 41 

in this) say that this is a useless question. 
William James and Leuba and the like tell 
us that we do not know God; we use God. 
Does He exist? How does He exist? It 
makes no difference, they say : only for the 
fulness of life act as if He did exist; the 
rest is useless nonsense. Truly, a wonder- 
ful plan of action for an intelligent man! 
It makes no difference whether one's whole 
spiritual edifice is built upon the solid rock 
of fact, or upon the shifting clouds of a 
mirage or the quaking quicksands of ap- 
parent usefulness, — nay, upon a delusion, 
an error, and a lie ! 

Such a position will not do for one who 
values the dignity of his reasonable being. 
It will not do for us. For us the bases of 
knowledge must be sure and solid. How- 
ever, it will be well at this juncture to call 
attention once more to two different kinds 
of knowledge which men have of God. 

There is the knowledge of common sense, 
which serves as the basis of religious and 
moral life ; a knowledge connatural to man ; 
a certainty so easily and clearly acquired, 
without reflex or conscious scientific exami- 



42 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

nation, that the logical process is scarcely 
perceived. This first knowledge of God, as 
the greatest of all beings, the first cause, 
intelligent, good and powerful to a supreme 
degree, may often be the result of the edu- 
cative force of instruction from others. 
Apart from this, however, it is based upon 
the perception of the principle of causality, 
as grasped by common sense, and is but 
clarified and solidified by more technical 
examination. It finds an echo in the pro- 
foundest depths of the reasonable nature 
of man, and founds a conviction stronger 
and more ineradicable than any artificial 
persuasion. So deep, in fact, has it cast its 
roots in the fibre of the human mind, that 
it cannot be torn out by any objection of the 
most brilliant conjurer of words.^ As a 
matter of concrete reality, when there is 
question of this knowledge of God, we look 
in vain for atheists, except among those 
whose viciousness has debased their mental 
and moral qualities to the level of brute- 
like degradation. 
But there is another knowledge of God, 

1 Cf . Scheeben, Dogmatik, II, 29. 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 43 

which is that of the philosopher and the ex- 
pert. This has the daring, humble though 
it be, to dig down into the heart of the 
mystery, to try to reach an understanding 
of God which excludes error with regard 
to the inward nature of the Deity, and to 
look at difficulties in order to solve them as 
best may be. This is the knowledge which 
it shall be our purpose to deepen in all 
humility. This too is the knowledge with 
regard to which there can arise the question 
of atheists. 

Beyond all doubt there are practical 
atheists, by which I mean men who live as 
though there were no God. A glance at the 
evil and degradation and crime in a de- 
moralized world is sufficient and sad proof 
of this. But besides these, there are those 
who theoretically and positively profess 
that there is no God. The statistics pub- 
lished by Professor Leuba with regard to 
the number of professors and students in 
certain seats of higher learning who doubt 
or deny the existence of a personal God, is 
positively appalling. We are tempted to 
ask, Is it possible that such men can be 



44 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

found? First of all, we must recall what 
Aristotle said long ago, that not everything 
uttered by the lips on this point is echoed 
in the sincere depths of the mind. Many 
who call themselves atheists are masquerad- 
ing under false colors. It tickles the vanity 
of their puny minds to pose among the ^in- 
tellectuals": it flatters their pitiable little- 
ness to shock the reverent and the godly: 
it soothes the terrors of the unwelcome re- 
morse of conscience to turn away from the 
anger of One who will repay. Often this 
attitude is a pose and a lie. Not only re- 
ligious-minded men, but blatant blasphem- 
ers of the Deity and deniers of His exist- 
ence, have said in the presence of the grim 
spectre of death, ^^God, have mercy on me!'' 
Furthermore, we may recall the position, 
ordinarily defended by Catholic thinkers, 
that there is no such ignorance in the mind 
without the killing blight of guilt in the 
heart. 

But, even with all this, how can such a 
state of mind exist at all? In many in- 
stances it is because men have been led 
astray by the evil of their lives; for the 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 45 

knowledge whicli does not go down into 
one's actual life is hut too apt to dwindle 
away and vanish into thin air. It is because 
men have turned their eyes away from the 
big fact, which is unmistakable, to the 
manner of explaining the fact, and because 
they have not been humble enough to 
acknowledge that ^^ there are more things 
in heaven and earth than are dreamed of 
in their philosophy.'' It is because they 
have committed themselves to systems of 
thought which are incompatible with truth 
in any field. This last reason is the ex- 
planation of the sad doubt or denial of 
God's existence in the minds of many of the 
wise ( !) ones of the world who hold to the 
relativist philosophies, which deny the value 
of every judgment on the inner nature of 
things. To attempt to bridge over the chaos 
between these philosophies and the common 
sense philosophy of mankind is like the folly 
of laboring to square the circle or to solve 
the problem of perpetual motion. 

The passage from the natural and almost 
instinctive knowledge of God to the scientific 
certainty about His existence and something 



46 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

of His nature can indeed be made with 
safety and profit, though there is room for 
the slipping which in ages past and present 
has brought untold multitudes to the follies 
of polytheism and such like excesses. To 
make this transition is a work of consid- 
erable difficulty, when attacked in all its 
metaphysical consequences. All cannot 
make it ; and from making it the many are 
spared, who from the connatural certainty 
of God's existence are led on to the accept- 
ance of the bright torch of revelation in the 
hands of faith, and thus escape the pitfalls 
which have buried so many millions of poor 
wandering humanity. 

In deepening the knowledge of God it is 
only those who are proud in their own con- 
ceit who fail. Though it is a matter of vital 
importance for them for time and eternity, 
such as these will not see the force of the 
solid arguments for the fact of the existence 
of God. Difficulties balk them, as they face 
the problem of reconciling the apparent con- 
tradictions of God's entire freedom and His 
unchangeable eternity. His merciful love 
and His stern justice, His provident care 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 47 

and His permission of evil. Difficulties 
these are, in very truth, but not such as to 
afford the least ground for reasonable doubt. 
Yet these difficulties quite vanquish them; 
and they turn away from God's existence 
in doubt or denial, because they are not 
humble enough to admit that the finite mind 
cannot comprehensively understand the ex- 
cellence of the Infinite. They hide their 
heads in the sand of agnosticism or ration- 
alism, and they cannot (for they v^ill not) 
see the sun in the heaven of the universe. 

First of all, there is the position of the 
agnostics. Their fundamental claim is that 
we cannot know God, that we cannot make 
any assertion, based on intellectual grounds, 
about the nature of God, nor, for matter of 
that, about the intrinsic nature of anything. 
This is the attitude of mind of not a few 
philosophers and scientists. It is that of 
Huxley and Spencer and Stuart Mill and 
others who have largely influenced the phil- 
osophic thought of modern times and 
through their philosophy have touched the 
religious realm. This agnostic position re- 
duces ideas to names, causality to mere 



48 THE BEDROCK OP BELIEF 

succession, thought itself to sense-percep- 
tion. It degrades man from his throne of 
nobility. Far from ranking man as "sl 
little less than the angels," it makes him but 
little better than the beasts. 

Following in the lead of the pseudo- 
mystics, who influenced Luther to his un- 
doing; treading in the footsteps of Schleier- 
macher, who banished any intellectual ele- 
ment from the domain of religion, Im- 
manuel Kant stands forth as the prophet ac- 
cepted by many. But he is the prophet of 
agnosticism. By faith, he holds, we may 
admit the existence of God; nay, we must 
postulate His existence as the basis of re- 
ligion and morality : but we can have no in- 
tellectual grasp of the truth of God, we can- 
not pass any certain judgment on the fact 
of His objective reality. 

Now, it is true, this agnosticism is not yet 
atheism; but it is the steep slope that rushes 
one into the dark depths of the denial of 
God. The agnostic is helpless in face of 
the rational verification of the common 
notion of God; he is a plaything for the 
scorn and a target for the scoffs of the out- 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 49 

and-out atheist. And if, recoiling from the 
chaos of atheism where death lurks, he 
would have firm ground to stand on, he must 
make of God an abstract law, as Taine and 
Eenan do, or a sort of soul of the world tak- 
ing the place of the individual souls within 
us, as William James does, or he will fall 
into some of the other forms of pantheism, — 
and pantheism is atheism pure and simple. 

The modernists afford another sad proof 
of this connection between agnosticism and 
atheism through pantheism.^ Take away 
the firm foundation of reason ; make the ob- 
ject of religion unknowable by the mind; 
place man in the hands of a blind instinct 
as the guide to his destiny; let his so-called 
religious experience rush him unseeing into 
the acceptance of what reason looks upon as 
glaring contradictions; let him clasp to his 
hungry heart the God within him, since he 
cannot reach the God who transcends his 
weakness; let him cleave to this immanent 
God, because after all he is identified with 
the Deity, as life is one with Life, — and his 
wretched soul is held fast by pantheism, 

iCf. Denziger, Enchiridion, 2082, 2109. 



50 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

which, once again, is but another name for 
atheism. 

Without entering upon a lengthy phil- 
osophical discussion, for which this is 
neither the time nor the place, we know that 
the philosophy of common sense stands un- 
shaken before the attacks of sensism and 
Kantian rationalism. If we are to avoid 
the folly of out-and-out scepticism ; if we are 
not to contradict the most obvious facts of 
human experience, we must admit with the 
common sense of mankind, that we can and 
do know things by our faculty of reason, 
which enables us to make use of that little 
word ^^is.'' It is this which differentiates 
us from the brute. We can say, as the beast 
cannot, ^^I am/^ '^This church is large, "* 
^^two and two are four"; and we can say 
it, because we have the intellectual appre- 
hension of truth. 

Nor is the pathway to knowledge of God 
blocked, as agnostics say it is, by the infinite 
distance which separates the finite from the 
infinite; for though the distance between 
the two is infinite, there is still a re- 
semblance between them. If God exists 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 51 

and is Being and All-Power, there can be 
no other being without resemblance to Him. 
Finite being, having the reason of itself in 
the Infinite, cannot be conceived in its in- 
most nature without relation to the Infinite, 
just as it cannot exist without some sort 
of participation of the Infinite. The only- 
thing which bears no resemblance to God is 
absolute nothingness. Between the finite 
and the Infinite there is a certain com- 
munity of nature, though not by identity; 
there is a sort of affinity, an analogy, a kind 
of resemblance. Call it by whatever name 
we will, explain it as we may, the fact of 
the resemblance remains ; and by reason of 
this resemblance we can truly know very 
much about God. In grasping our own 
existence, our liberty, our thought, we have 
an image, infinitely imperfect, but inevi- 
tably true, of the existence, the liberty, and 
the thought of God. God is all that and 
infinitely more; and this we know, even 
though we cannot grasp the full significance 
of the absolute perfection of God's proper 
excellence. 

So, there is a bridge between the tran- 



52 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

scendent God and the thinking subject; and 
the bridge is the very nature of the one 
who thinks. God Himself we can know, 
though we cannot know Him perfectly as 
He is in Himself. By reason's light we can- 
not penetrate the mysterious depths of the 
Godhead and comprehend the very manner 
in which the divine attributes exist in God's 
inmost infinite nature. But isn't something 
like this true even with regard to our 
friends ? We know our friends themselves, 
though we may not perfectly know them as 
they are in themselves. Nay, in one sense, 
our knowledge of God is more sure than 
our knowledge of our intimates. The man 
who is closely associated with us may stretch 
forth his hand in friendship at the moment 
that his heart conceives treachery against 
us. We may doubt his good will, his kind- 
ness of heart, and the rest ; there are many 
things about him that we cannot know with 
sureness. But we can know with absolute 
certainty and by the light of reason alone 
that God is and cannot lie, that He is in- 
finitely wise and powerful and good and 
holy. Of all the beings that we can know 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 53 

He is, in a sense, the best known, even as 
He knows us the best. 

That fact, then, is settled. We can know 
a great deal about God; and the first of 
these things that we can know and do know 
and can prove and do prove is that God 
exists. The consideration of the proofs of 
His existence is the answer to the rational- 
ists, who go beyond the position of the 
agnostics and not only say that we cannot 
know whether God exists or not, but affirm 
without hesitation that ^^ there is no God.'' 
That, in the words of the Psalmist, is what 
the fool says: ^^The fool hath said in his 
heart: There is no God." ^ 

With great completeness and force St. 
Thomas of Aquin puts before us the tradi- 
tional reasons for the existence of God. In 
the briefest of brief forms the argument 
comes to this. All that falls within the 
scope of our experience in the great world 
of the universe and in the little world which 
we ourselves are, is subject to motion and 
change, is caused, is contingent and does 
not necessarily exist, is composite and im- 

1 Ps. XIIT, 1. 



54 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

perfect, and is an instance of multiplicity 
reduced to order. From all this, by the 
common sense principle of causality, in one 
or other of its forms, the mind rightly con- 
cludes to the existence of a being that is the 
source of its own activity, not subject to 
change, uncaused, necessary, simple and 
perfect, and the reason of order in all else. 
And this being, self -existent, existence itself 
and intelligence itself, is God. 

Or we may put the matter in this way. 
Beginning with the principle which cannot 
be denied without violating the canons of 
common sense and sound philosophy, that 
whatever has not within itself the reason of 
its own existence must have that reason in 
some other being that is its cause, which 
means to say that what is greater does not 
come forth from what is less, or that the 
lower is not to be explained except by what 
is higher, — it follows with logical necessity, 
that what is in a state of flux or transition 
and is not determined of itself can have its 
determination only from something that is 
determined by its very being; that what is 
the result of causality must come from that 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 55 

which is itself uncaused; that what is con- 
tingent is dependent upon what is neces- 
sary; that what is composite and multiple 
and imperfect is due to what is simple and 
one and perfect; and finally, that order is 
the result of intelligence. And the result 
is — God. 

Let us look around us in the world. Let 
us dive into the depths of human thought 
and volition. What do we see? Every- 
where we see beings that are capable of non- 
existence, since as a matter of fact they do 
not always exist in unchanging perfection. 
The rocks are wearing away, as they have 
worn away for uncounted ages : the minerals 
are entering into new combinations and are 
taken up into higher forms of being. 
Animals begin to breathe and move, and 
then they die and corrupt. Man is born, 
lives his little life, and goes the way of all 
flesh and is put away from the eyes of men. 
Take the world of sense and physical 
science, and accept the latest of modern 
theories about its formation and develop- 
ment; and the conclusion becomes but the 
stronger, that at least its mode of motion, 



56 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

bewildering in the smallest portion of 
matter, is dying down. If so, it must have 
had a beginning, or else long ago, nay, al- 
most an eternity ago, it would have come to 
complete inertness. Take the spirit world 
of man with his thoughts and volitions : we 
find him forever changing. Everj^thing is 
in a state of transition, passing from one 
determination to another. Things such as 
these are not determined by their very be- 
ing; they have not within themselves the 
reason of their existence. Hence they must 
have it in another ; they were caused by an- 
other, that must have within itself the rea- 
son of its own existence and must be exist- 
ence itself. 

For the full force of this argument it is 
not essential that we should come to a begin- 
ning of things in time, — ^though in the light 
of science the material world cannot be ex- 
plained otherwise than as having had such | 
a temporal beginning. Even if the series 
of changes in its evolution is made eternal, 
the world is eternally insufficient to explain 
itself. 

For, if all the parts of the world are con- 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 57 

tingent and capable of non-existence, the 
whole is contingent and capable of non- 
existence. There is here no question of add- 
ing a partial reason of existence to another 
partial reason of existence, and thus coming 
to a sum which is capable of explaining it- 
self. It is a question of adding things 
which of themselves are capable of non- 
existence to others of a like nature ; and the 
sum of these, even if conceived to be infinite, 
does not become less capable of not being. 
Add millions of zeros to other millions of 
zeros, and the sum is zero: an indefinite 
series of absolute idiots cannot equal an in- 
telligent man. The whole series, as con- 
tingent and caused, must depend upon some- 
thing or someone distinct from the series. 
Otherwise, far from explaining these other 
beings, it would itself still have to be ac- 
counted for. 

In all this we have been looking at the 
vast world with its unnumbered units. We 
might have begun with any single thing, — 
a clod, a flower, an animal, a man. The line 
of thought is the same as that already pro- 
posed. Either that thing is self-existent 



58 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

and is possessed of all the perfections con- 
noted by self -existence (which we know is 
not the case), or it is dependent upon an- 
other: this other is either self-existent or 
itself depends upon another: and so finally 
we must come to the self-existent being 
whom we call God. 

Nor, once more, can we escape the rigor- 
ous logic of the conclusion by adding link 
after link to the chain of dependence, until 
it stretches out to infinite eternity. For, 
such a chain would not sustain itself: it 
would fall into everlasting nothingness, un- 
less it were fastened to the iromovable sup- 
port of all. 

So, from anything whatever outside of us 
we mount to the sure knowledge of God. 
And if, in the folly of the subjectivists, we 
should deny the objective reality of aught 
outside of ourselves, we cannot without com- 
mitting intellectual suicide deny our own 
existence. And from our single selves we 
can begin the selfsame argument and reach 
the selfsame irrefragable conclusion. 

We may add, merely in passing and with- 
out pursuing the argument to its final depth, 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 59 

that all about us and within is composite 
and multiple and, as a consequence, imper- 
fect, and as such clamors for a cause outside 
of itself. Elements diverse of themselves 
cannot of themselves and as such be com- 
bined to form a unity. This union must 
come from without, from a cause simple, 
one, perfect, — from God; or else the 
Sisyphean labor of explanation begins 
anew. But we need not press this point. 

Therefore, from the world outside of us 
or from our very selves we come to the 
knowledge of the necessary, uncaused, self- 
existent Being that is existence itself. But 
this is not yet God? Nay, but it is. But 
it is not yet a personal God? Nay, but it 
is. The steps of the proof of His person- 
ality are these : the Being we have already 
proved is distinct from the world, since He 
is its cause ; He is existence itself, since He 
is self-existent ; he is pure actuality without 
the least possible shade of potentiality, 
never becoming anything, eternally being 
what He is, since He is existence itself; He 
is one and absolute. He is infinite perfection, 
and consequently He is intelligence itself. 



60 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

since He is pure actuality. And all this un- 
questionably means a personal God. 

Each of these steps is sound and solid; 
yet the subtlety of the argument might dis- 
courage some. So, let us follow another 
path. We have proved the reality of the 
self-existent Being who is the cause of all 
outside Himself. We have only to estab- 
lish His intelligence, and His personality 
is proved. Now, we can see this intelli- 
gence from the order of the world. 

To insist upon the marvelous order in this 
world would appear quite unnecessary. 
That order is patent to the most casual ob- 
server. It becomes but the more striking, 
the more we look either at the whole uni- 
verse with its manifold forces working with 
unfailing accuracy, at the smallest of living 
organisms, or at the minutest of material 
particles with the possibilities opened up 
by scientific investigation. The most con- 
firmed materialists and evolutionists are 
forced by the evidence of things to admit 
an apparent finality in the world, though 
they vainly try to explain it all without a 
ruling intelligence. 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 61 

The argument from design or order comes 
to this. A means cannot be ordained to an 
end except by an intelligent cause, since 
only intelligence can grasp the relation of 
a means to an end. If, then, in nature 
among the beings devoid of intelligence 
there are means ordained to an end, these 
means are thus directed, not by these non- 
intelligent beings, but by an intelligent 
cause outside of them: thus nature, which 
is the effect of the uncaused. Supreme Being, 
the cause of all, points out that cause as 
intelligent, and therefore as personal. 
Now, there are in nature unquestionable 
examples (it is all one big example) of non- 
intelligent beings directed to an end, not by 
themselves, but by an extrinsic intelligence. 

It is not imperative to examine into the 
external finality of things, that is, we need 
not always know the precise purpose for 
which these things were made or ordained. 
We need not know just why the millions of 
gnats or flies or other insects live and 
multiply: we need not know exactly why 
the many noxious or poisonous plants grow 
in apparently useless profusion. Often 



62 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

this is quite beyond our vision, — a proof of 
the limitation of our knowledge. But the 
internal direction of means to an end with- 
in the thing itself is of capital consequence ; 
and this finality is altogether clear and cer- 
tain. 

It is quite sure that the eye is made to 
see, the ear to hear, the wing of the bird 
to fly, and so on. To say that the bird flies 
because it has wings, not that it has wings 
for flying; that it builds its nest because it 
must gather straw, not that it gathers straw 
for its nest ; to say that a man hears because 
he has ears, not that he has ears for hearing ; 
that he sees because he has eyes, not that 
he has eyes for seeing, — this is to fly in the 
face of common sense, of science, and of rea- 
son itself. 

It jars on common sense. For, conmion 
sense always distinguishes an organism 
from the inanimate aggregation of which 
the materialist prates, and will always agree 
with the plain good sense of Ruskin, who 
said: ^^They (the scientists) come and tell 
you that there is as much heat or motion 
or calorific energy in a tea-kettle as in a 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 63 

Gier-eagle. Very good; that is so; and it 
is very interesting. It takes just as much 
heat as will boil the kettle to take the eagle 
up to his nest. . . . But we, acknowledging 
the equality and similarity of the kettle and 
the bird in all scientific aspects, attach our 
principal interest to the difference in their 
forms. For us, the primarily cognizable 
facts in the two things are that the kettle 
has a spout and the eagle a beak; the one 
has a lid on its back, the other a pair of 
wings, — not to speak of the distinction of 
volition, which the philosopher may . . . 
call merely a form or mode of force; but 
then . . . the form or mode is the gist of 
the business. The kettle chooses to sit on 
the hob ; the eagle to recline on the air. It 
is the fact of the choice, not the equal degree 
of temperature in the fulfillment of it, 
which appears to us the more interesting 
circumstance; — though the other is very 
interesting too. Exceedingly so !'' ^ 

The denial of internal finality is opposed 
to sound science. The complicated and 
harmonious structure of an eye or an ear, 

1 Ethics of the Dust, X, 126. 



64 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

appearing as the survival of the fittest 
through natural selection without a design- 
ing intellect, is as little intelligible as it is 
that the type of a printing-shop, promiscu- 
ously huddled together, should reproduce 
Shakespeare's peerless plays without an in- 
telligence to arrange the letters into words, 
without the mind and heart of Shake- 
speare's genius to conceive and express his 
glowing thoughts. To stand for this is not 
science : it is folly. 

A few years ago a popular magazine pro- 
duced the reflections of a mechanic who had 
made a little fortune through a patented 
meat-chopper and then turned philosopher. 
There was nothing original in the article, 
except possibly the manner of presentment, 
although it was heralded as a sensational 
novelty. What the writer said was true 
and amounted to this: ^^ There are seven- 
teen pieces to my meat-chopper; and it 
takes a clever factory-girl two hours and a 
half to learn how to put these pieces to- 
gether. Now, if these seventeen pieces 
were thrown together in a barrel and shaken 
and whirled about, I'm perfectly sure that 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 65 

they would not make my meat-chopper in 
a million years." And he was right. But 
what if there had been heaped in the barrel 
only a crude mass of unshaped and form- 
less iron, or of iron-ore from which the iron 
was not yet separated? In uncounted bil- 
lions of years how much chance would there 
be of the seventeen pieces of his meat- 
chopper ever being formed, before they 
were arranged according to his patent? 
And what was his meat-chopper compared 
to a bird's wing, to a human eye or ear, to 
human eyes and ears in unnumbered in- 
stances, with harmonious effect and un- 
swerving constancy? How could order 
ever result without an intelligent designer ? 
To say that it could is to stultify reason. 
William James says that the principle of 
Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel, and the like, 
about natural selection in the struggle for 
existence makes shipwreck of the finality 
of things. Clear minded thinkers, even 
among non-Catholic philosophers and sci- 
entists, have come to see things in truer 
light. Natural selection destroys the proof 
from finality! It could do so only by ex- 



66 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

plaining everything by chance or by a blind 
necessity. 

Now, chance is the absence of any ex- 
planation, and to say that order is due to 
chance is to say that effects are without 
causes, that order has been born of disorder, 
that the less has produced the greater, which 
means that nothingness has brought forth 
being. And as for blind necessity, even if 
it existed in the world, it would itself pre- 
suppose finality. For, if a result is deter- 
mined, it must be predetermined by finality. 
Otherwise either everything or nothing 
would be produced, determination would 
come from indetermination, the greater 
would result from the less, — and there 
would be an effect without a cause. 

From this internal finality, then, from 
which we can advance to external finality, 
but need not for the force of the argument ; 
from this order in the world, it is clear that 
the self-existent, necessary cause, distinct 
from the world, is intelligent, and therefore 
is a person. The proof of a personal God 
stands. 

It cannot be overturned without denying 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 67 

the fundamental principles of reason. It 
cannot be set aside without rejecting the 
self-evident axiom, that whatever is must 
have a reason for its existence, which, for 
things that are not self -existent, means that 
they have a cause. To deny this is to deny 
the principle of identity: for it is to make 
what is the same as what is not ; it is to say 
that white is not white, and black is not 
black, that being is not being, and nothing- 
ness is not nothingness. All this, I know, 
sounds like the maunderings of a madman ; 
but it is precisely what Hegel held. For, 
not wishing to acknowledge God, above and 
distinct from the world, he was forced to 
put out-and-out contradiction at the root 
of everything, and to say : Being pure and 
simple is equivalent to non-being; it is it- 
self and its contrary; existence is non- 
existence; reality is nothingness. To be 
driven to expressions such as these is a fate 
which we might well deprecate in the case 
of anyone. But let us face the issue hon- 
estly: there is the choice (is there room for 
choice?), — either God or radical absurdity. 
In the following lecture we shall consider 



68 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

some further truths and examine some of 
the wrong ideas about God, whose existence 
we have proved. We shall stand in His 
august presence and learn to grow in rev- 
erence for Him. But from what we have 
already established we can look up from the 
depths of our littleness to His overwhelm- 
ing majesty, and, as the realization of His 
divine excellence grows in our minds, our 
hearts too can flare up in the fire of love for 
Him who is above all. 

Eemembering that whatever is of worth 
here below has come forth from Him, we 
can rise from our lowliness to His sublimity. 
The truth and the beauty of earth and the 
majesty of even the material world, but 
much more the tender sweetness of friend- 
ship and love, the innocence of childhood 
and the mellowness of old age, — in a word, 
all that makes this world of ours splendid 
and desirable we can recognize and appre- 
ciate. It transports us beyond ourselves. 
But let us raise up our eyes : let us lift up 
our hearts. ^^Sursum corda!" All finite 
truth and beauty and goodness are but 
struggling rays from the infinite sun of per- 



ALPHA AND OMEGA 69 

fection, that is God; only little lost chords 
of music from the iufinite harmony of ex- 
cellence, that is God; only tiny wandering 
streams from the infinite fountain-head of 
everything desirable, that is God; only the 
faintest of reflections from the unimagin- 
able splendor of Him who is the ^^ beauty 
ever ancient, ever new." 

If we can esteem human truth, let us 
prize above all infinite truth: if we can 
cleave to human goodness, let us clasp to our 
souPs centre the infinite goodness of God: 
if we can love anything of human value, let 
us bind ourselves with the unbreakable 
cords of unfailing loyalty and affection to 
God. Yes, the commandment which was 
given as the rule of life by the mouth of the 
Eternal, which was repeated by the blessed 
lips of the gentle Christ when He walked 
the ways of human weakness, is the same 
law that is whispered in the depths of the 
himian soul and thundered throughout the 
length and breadth of a dependent universe : 
^^Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, 
and with all thy strength, and with all thy 



70 THE BEDROCK OP BELIEF 

mind/'^ If we fulfill this law, the great 
glad truth of a joyful optimism will 
brighten our lives. Of a truth, God is in 
His heaven ; and even if all is not yet right 
with the world (and the sorrows and horrors 
of war show that now all is not right), it 
will be right some day and somehow under 
the providence of Him who is the beginning 
and the end, Alpha and Omega, our Lord 
and our God, our God and our AU. 

1 Luke X, 27, 



LECTUEE III 

THE LOED OF THE UNIVERSE 

Development of true notion of God. Life and liberty 
not incompatible with ehangelessness. Omnipo- 
tent: provident: just and merciful: infinitely 
happy. False views. Materialism contradictory. 
Pantheism: realistic; idealistic. Appeal to mod- 
ern mind. Results : destruction of ideal of God ; 
death-knell to religion. Other variations of 
pantheism. Problem of evil in world. Moral 
evil presupposes God. Physical evil under God 's 
providence tends to higher good. Value of pain. 
Christian Science and New Thought: subversive 
of Christianity ; essentially pantheistic. 

After examining into the nature of re- 
ligion and finding that it is the free depend- 
ence of man npon God ; after seeing how the 
universal fact of the religious sentiment 
amongst all mankind has no sufficient ex- 
planation in the theories of the evolution- 
ists; after understanding how the doctrine 
of theism with its consequences completely 
explains the fundamental fact, and how, 
therefore, even before its entire truth has 

71 



72 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

been established, it is worthy of serious con- 
sideration, we went further, and in the pre- 
ceding lecture we began the study of the 
objective truth of theism. We put the 
question, Does God exist ? and can we estab- 
lish with certainty this fact of His exist- 
ence? The agnostics, whether positivists 
or rationalists, reply that we cannot know 
anything about God, because we cannot 
know the inner nature of anything, and 
especially because there is an infinite dis- 
tance between the finite and the infinite, — 
a distance which can never be bridged over. 
But we saw that we can know much, very 
much about God, and that for knowledge 
the distance is bridged over at least by the 
thinking subject. For, even if he closes his 
eyes to the outside world, from his single 
self man can come to the sure knowledge of 
God. 

The traditional proofs of God's existence, 
which have not been overturned by false 
philosophy and cannot be, we studied. We 
started with the principle of causality, or 
with the principle which is even more fund- 
amental, that everything must have a suffi- 



THE LOED OP THE UNIVEESE 73 

cient reason for itself either within itself 
or outside its being. To deny this is to deny 
the principle of contradiction or of identity, 
and to say that white is black, that being 
is nothingness ; and to say that, is to commit 
intellectual suicide. By this principle, we 
rose from the consideration of anything that 
exists to the necessary, uncaused Being, the 
cause of all else, — and that is God, whose 
essence is Being itself. 

Furthermore, both from the nature of 
such a Being and from the actual manifesta- 
tion of intelligent design in the world 
around us we rightly concluded to the in- 
telligence of Him who is the first cause of 
all. And thus, from the knowledge of the 
supreme, uncaused, necessary Being, who is 
distinct from the things of the world and 
is intelligent, we were justified in asserting 
the personality of God, who is the source of 
all that is noble and true and good and sub- 
lime and is worthy of unconditioned 
homage. We recognized that He is the 
beginning and end of all things, and we 
closed with our humbled spirits bowed down 
before His overwhelming magnificence. 



74 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

At present let us stand before ^'The Lord 
of the Universe," and let us try to know 
more clearly the truth of His supreme lord- 
ship (for that is the firm rock on which re- 
ligion rests) and to recognize yet more 
thoroughly the falseness of certain views 
which distort the truth about Him. 

The truth is that God is absolute Being, 
simple and immutable, yet living and 
possessed of all perfections, because He is 
Being itself. The denial of God's life and 
liberty, and the consequent denial of divine 
personality, made by Spencer and Bergson 
and others, is largely due to their miscon- 
ception about the kind of knowledge which 
we have of God. 

We have seen that this knowledge of ours 
is true, but incomplete; that it is accurate, 
but by similarity or analogy. Thus, we do 
not say that God has being just in the same 
way as we have it : we are not foolish enough 
to assert that the manner of intelligence and 
freedom in God is quite the same as it is in 
us. Far from it. And so too, we do not 
say that God is living in the same way in 
which we are living. He is all that we 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 75 

understand by life; all that, and infinitely 
more. Life as such (and the same is true 
of liberty) , does not imply change or altera- 
tion. Movement and change are only im- 
perfections of created and finite life, which 
is steeped in incompleteness and potential- 
ity and is not possessed of the plenitude of 
everything that it can have. Nay, in ma- 
terial things life is in constant change just 
because it is forever dying and must repair 
by the processes of assimilation the inroads 
of approaching dissolution. 

No, it is not essential that a living being 
should change. What is essential is that it 
should have within itself the principle of 
immanent activity, whether of itself or by 
participation from a higher power. The 
rock is not alive, because it has not within 
itself the principle of actions that are 
initiated and consummated in itself; the 
plant is alive, because it has, though the 
form and the end of this activity are from 
the author of nature and not from itself. 
The animal has a higher life, because by the 
senses it can perceive the objects towards 
which it tends. Man has a still loftier and 



76 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

nobler life, because he can know the relation 
of means to an end, because he can be master 
of his actions and can determine his own 
choice, although he stands in need of things 
outside of himself to draw him to activity 
and urge him to attainment. 

All these forms of life are real, but are 
limited and imperfect. Only Being itself, 
the Absolute, God, is sovereignly and un- 
changeably li^dng, because He has mthin 
and of Himself all the elements of His ac- 
tivity, and is Life itself, as He is Truth and 
Goodness. 

When we speak of God's unchangeable- 
ness we do not wish to say that He is inert 
and unconscious and all but amorphous, as 
some have said and do say. On the con- 
trary, we declare that since He is existence 
itself and absolute Being, He is activity and 
action itself, knowledge itself, love itself. 
This is what we maintain, even whilst we 
are honest enough to admit that we can but 
grope amidst the grandeur and cannot 
glimpse the entire solution of the mystery 
of His eternal activity and the effect of this 
activity in time, the marvel of His co- 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 77 

existence with time and eternity, and the 
secret of His divine liberty. 

Omnipotence too is essential to the being 
of God. Just as light illumines and fire 
warms, so Being itself can make real and 
existent whatever does not imply contradic- 
tion. As the intelligent and supreme cause 
of all, God has a providence over the work 
of His hands. He is just and merciful: 
just, because, as intelligent and good, He 
must give to each what is necessary to reach 
the end which He has placed before it, and 
because, loving Himself as goodness itself, 
He must guard His sovereign rights and 
repress their violation: merciful, because, 
being all-powerful and infinitely good, it 
beseems Him to give, to lift up, to pity. 
Justice is the triumph of God; mercy. His 
glory and the motive which draws ^^ supreme 
riches down to supreme poverty." 

In this mysterious life of the Deity God 
is sovereignly happy in His infinite knowl- 
edge and love of His own infinite excellence. 
Needing no creature; thrillingly peaceful 
and exultantly glad in the unsoundable 
depths of joy that is Himself; alone, but 



78 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

never lonely, throughout the pulsing aeons 
of an unbeginning, never-ending eternity, — 
no, we cannot grasp it all, but we can 
recognize it and adore. 

Such is the notion of God at which we 
can arrive by the power of reason itself, 
when it dares to look right ahead and 
straight up to God, and is neither clouded 
by the mists of passion nor blinded by the 
pride which refuses to acknowledge the 
great and thrilling fact because of our 
inability to give a complete account of the 
manner of the fact or of the intrinsic rea- 
son of its existence. To expect to compre- 
hend God and to understand the inmost re- 
cesses of His unfathomable being is pride 
unbearable ; for to do that it would be neces- 
sary either that God should not be God, or 
that each of us should be divine. 

It is not pleasant to turn from light to 
darkness, from supreme majesty to hideous 
caricature; but our purpose demands it. 
And so, we must turn from all this perfec- 
tion to the travesty of greatness which has 
been dreamed by some of mankind's erring 
minds. 



THE LOED OF THE UNIVEESB 79 

Of course, there is first of all the position 
of the materialists, who will admit nothing 
but matter. Their doctrine is destructive 
of the very idea of God : how far it is sub- 
versive of all true human nobility and of all 
sound morality we shall consider later on. 
Let the materialist suppose matter eternal 
and living, as he must, if he is to make the 
faintest attempt to explain this world of 
ours: even then he is dragged down into 
the black depths of contradiction. For, 
even if it is eternal and living and the stuff 
of which all is made, still of itself it is in- 
sufficient to explain its own existence. It 
is changeable and the substratum of changes 
in the visible things around us, and as such 
it is in a state of potentiality and imperfec- 
tion. Therefore it cannot be the reason of 
its own existence; for what is self -existent 
is pure actuality and perfection without 
limit, — ^which is precisely what matter is 
not. Since it is not the reason of its own 
existence, for its separation from the depths 
of nothingness it is necessarily dependent, 
whether in time or eternity, upon the self- 
existent God. 



80 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

He, then, who makes matter self-existent 
and his god, must reject its very existence, 
as its divinity is disproved ; and he who ad- 
mits its limitations and denies its cause, af- 
firms its existence and denies it in the same 
breath. There is nothing left for the ma- 
terialist except to close his lips with the as- 
sumed wisdom of apparent humility and 
take refuge in the dictum of the agnostics, 
that we can know nothing about ^^the great 
unknown." The falsity of this position we 
have already considered. The idol of ma- 
terialism has fallen. 

Another idol before which many stand 
(they do not bow, for the very reason that 
reverence is excluded) is the idol of panthe- 
ism in some one of its many forms. In its 
strict sense, according to which there is 
but one reality in the universe, pantheism 
either means that the world is absorbed in 
God, which is acosmism and the denial of the 
reality of the material universe, or that God 
Is absorbed in the world, which is out-and- 
out atheism. The realistic pantheism of 
some of the ancients and of Spinoza is so 
patently self -destructive, that the minds of 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 81 

many have swung back to the idealistic 
pantheism, which has had such a vogue in 
modern thought. 

The prophet of rationalistic thought, 
Immanuel Kant, is largely responsible for 
this. He attacked materialism on the 
ground of matter's dependence upon con- 
sciousness. We can know nothing, he said, 
about the inner nature of things; and any 
attempt to establish the objective reality of 
the world, just as any attempt to establish 
the objective reality of soul-substance or of 
God Himself must end in contradiction: all 
of these are reduced to thought-products. 
Starting from such premises, his argument 
could be destructive of materialism only on 
the assumption that matter has no reality 
apart from our consciousness of it ; and this 
would be to destroy matter and to fall into 
an absurdity, opposite to that of material- 
ism, but equally as great. 

This fatal subjectivism, advocated by 
Kant, paved the way for the pantheistic 
systems of his followers, Fichte, Schelling, 
and Hegel. In their hazy theories about 
everything being an emanation or an evolu- 



82 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

tion of the Ego or the All-One or the Abso- 
lute, God never is^ but is always growing 
to realization, always decoming something. 
Yet this evolutionistic pantheism could be 
true, only if the principle of identity and of 
non-contradiction were without real value, 
only if white were not white and black were 
not black, only if being were nothingness 
and absurdity were the law of thought and 
reality. 

Without going into a lengthy and subtile 
discussion of all this, we may rest satisfied 
with what we have already proved about the 
Supreme Being. God is Being itself, with- 
out parts which are the marks of weakness 
and imperfection, without succession or 
potentiality which are the badge of the 
finite. As a necessary consequence of this, 
there can be no emanation from God of 
something which is at once divine and not 
divine; there can be no evolution in the 
unchangeable and all-perfect infinity of His 
being. God is not growing into something : 
He is. 

In spite of the radical contradiction of 
the system, it is remarkable what a hold 



THE LOED OF THE UNIVERSE 83 

pantheism has taken by its appeal to the 
modern mind. There are several reasons 
for this. For many evolution is the 
shibboleth of intellectuality; and pantheism 
proclaims God's progressive self-realiza- 
tion from eternity by a sort of struggle to- 
wards perfection, which is but a higher 
form of the struggle for existence. Then 
too, the vagueness of modern thought with 
its appeal to the religious sense, its exalta- 
tion of the clamor of the human heart, its 
rejection of intelligence and its substitution 
of feeling and imagination and experience 
as the sole basis of higher striving,— all this 
is quite in tune with pantheism, which looks 
on these experiences as the stirring of the 
One-Being within us, who is our inner soul 
and the soul of the world of nature without. 
Again, modern thought with its acceptance 
of the growing progress of everything is 
quite averse to freedom and to an5d:hing 
which might contravene what is looked 
upon as the absolute unchangeableness of 
the laws of nature; and pantheism coddles 
this aversion, since it makes all the in- 
evitable manifestation of the One. 



84 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

Another phase of the modern mind is its 
tendency to reduce everything to unity, to 
dig down to the one ground beneath the 
multiplicity of things around us. There is, 
of course, a true unifying principle of all 
things. God is this principle, not because 
He is identified with everything, but be- 
cause He produces all things as their first 
efficient cause, because He operates in and 
through all things, because He stands as the 
last end for which all that is exists, be- 
cause, in the truest of all senses. He is the 
source of all thought and volition and 
reality. But pantheism would have all 
things, from the atom and force to the 
philosopher and the saint, absolutely one in 
the relentless onward march. Yet there 
must be no hampering of the modern mind. 
Liberty, which is rejected on one count, is 
still clung to as the dearest of possessions : 
there must be no authority placed above 
man, especially in the realm of thought: 
there must be no hide-bound dogmas; for 
again, there is nothing fixed and absolute, 
but only an endless flux and change. And all 
these tendencies pantheism caresses and flat- 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVEESE 85 

ters. It tells its adherents to think what 
they please, or rather to feel what they list, 
to grasp the fulness of their individual soul- 
stirring, for it is the God within them. 

Does all this sound like the old strains of 
modernism? It does; for it is modernism 
again, which knows no transcendent God, 
but only an immanent Deity. In its sub- 
jectivism modernism is essentially pantheis- 
tic, since only in a pantheistic system could 
direct experience touch the Divinity. 

What, then, becomes of the notion of God 
in such a system ? Pantheism makes it void. 
It despoils God of the attributes which are 
His forevermore. He is no longer a per- 
sonal being; He is not the intelligent cause 
of the world, designing, creating, governing 
with bountiful providence. If not forever 
unconscious. He attains to consciousness 
only after endless and almost eternal striv- 
ing. In other words. He becomes God; 
from imperfection He grows to fulness of 
being, helpless to determine the direction 
which this development will take, unable to 
fix the change towards what is better rather 
than to what is lower. In brief, He is im- 



86 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

perfect and changeable and impersonal ; and 
all this means that He is not God and the 
Lord of all. 

It cannot be said by the pantheist that 
God is the author of the moral world, and 
much less that He is the moral order of the 
world, as Fichte declares; for since He is 
urged on by sheer blind necessity. He is 
neither good nor evil, and could establish 
a moral order neither for Himself nor for 
others. And if it is still maintained, that, 
no matter what is said, there is a moral 
order, this only thrusts pantheism deeper 
down into the depths ; for it is to throw back 
upon God Himself all the meanness and 
littleness and crimes of the most degraded 
of mortals, — and this is to put God im- 
measurably lower than the lowest of de- 
based humanity in its foulest manifestations. 

Without dwelling at length on what be- 
comes of man in this concept of the scheme 
of things (we shall come back to that in 
some later reflections), we may pause to 
ask ourselves what we really think of this 
monstrous idol, which a thoughtless minor- 
ity of ^^wise ones" has tried to lift to the 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 87 

throne of God. Disguise as they may the 
Moloch's foul features with the veils of a 
false mysticism, the demon eyes peer 
through and stab the soul to death: sur- 
round the throne of the spectre with the 
fair trappings of musical words, and soothe 
the drugged senses with the voice of poetic 
utterance, — the rasping accents of horror 
pierce through the gloom and sound the 
sentence of despair. Pantheism rings the 
death-knell of religion. Before the pan- 
theistic deity man may grovel in fear, 
though he may just as well be scornful; but 
he cannot feel the thrill of love. He may 
attempt propitiation; yet he stultifies him- 
self in so doing, since his deity is urged on 
by a necessity that cannot be turned aside. 
He may pour forth his soul's longing in 
prayer; but he is a fool for his pains, since 
the impersonal, unconscious one cannot 
hear and could not succor, if it did. No; 
to hold to such a God is to ring down the 
curtain on a blackened stage, with the 
death-cry of a plaything of fate shrieldng 
from the depths of a despairing soul. 
At the root of all this pantheistic thought 



88 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

is the fundamental contention that God is 
not perfect Being, but is becoming some- 
thing He was not, and is growing to a fuller 
realization. This idea (old as paganism, 
for that matter), is found today in the 
thought of others who are not professed 
pantheists, but who do not recognize the 
Lord of the universe. 

This is the attitude of some of those 
writers who may be styled ^^revolutionary" 
and who have gained a hearing by the sen- 
sationalism of their position. Bernard 
Shaw is of this type; for he declared that 
God is ^^a finite being as helpless as our- 
selves ; somewhat to be pitied, whom we can 
aid and help, and who in turn can help us." ^ 
Along the same lines and largely for the 
same reasons runs the thought of the 
English novelist, H. G. Wells, who gives us 
his idea of God in his latest book, Mr. 
Britling Sees It Through. For him, God 
must put away His omnipotence ; the Deity 
is but struggling for the better against an 
infinite Necessity. We are told that God is 
but finite ; and the old pagan notion of the 

1 Cf. Month, April, 1917. 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 89 

Greek tragedians and of Plato is revived, 
according to which the Deity stands over 
against a blind Fate that He cannot control. 
Yet He is greater than Fate, or He will be, 
since eventually He can rise superior to it, 
not by omnipotence, but by love. 

We see here the same old groping after 
perfection, which we haA^e noted in the posi- 
tion of the pantheists, the same evolution 
to what is higher and better and nobler. 
But, on the principles of the pantheists or 
of Mr. Wells, what guarantee is there, that 
it will always be an advance instead of a re- 
treat, or that the outcome will be triumph 
instead of utter failure? None whatever! 
If God is not Master, and for such men He 
is not yet, then He is not God. This is the 
outcome of their theory, and this is the con- 
tradiction of the very notion of God. No, 
*^ Omnipotence cannot be wrested from God: 
without it Love itself fails.'' 

The reason why Mr. Wells is foiled is the 
same reason that has been the rock on 
which the ship of many another proud 
mariner of thought has split. It is the old 
problem of evil in the world. This too is 



90 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

the ground on which many others base their 
denial of God, — Schopenhauer and Vol- 
taire and John Stuart Mill and the ]30siti- 
vists and sentimentalists and sensists. Of 
a truth, dark with mystery is the problem ; 
and in the last analysis we must bow our 
heads before the majesty of the divine and 
must acknowledge that ^^ God's thoughts are 
not our thoughts and God's ways are not our 
ways."^ Yet something of the secret we 
can glimpse, and in the honesty of our 
humility we can trust that the darkness will 
be dissipated, when God will have taken 
away the veil. 

The greatest difficulty arises from the 
permission of moral evil in the world of 
which God is Master. But, — and let us note 
it well, — there cannot be the beginning of 
a reasonable doubt against God's existence 
and His infinite attributes from the pres- 
ence of moral evil in the world. And why ? 
Simply because the very fact of moral evil 
presupposes God's existence. There would 
be no moral evil, if there were no moral law; 
and there would be no moral law, if there 

1 Cf . Isaias LV, 8. 



THE LORD OP THE UNIVERSE 91 

were no God who is the Lawgiver. So, the 
very presence of this moral evil, the very 
heinousness of guilt bears with it the 
recognition of the majesty of God. Let us 
remember this well, — if there were no God, 
there would be no moral evil; since ad- 
mittedly there is moral evil, so too is there 
a God, who is offended and who will repay. 
Even if we cannot explain the whole prob- 
lem to the satisfaction of our little minds, 
we can rest in the assurance that God is 
great enough to draw good out of evil. It is 
as St. Augustine said : ^^ There would be no 
evil in all God's works if he were not om- 
nipotent enough and good enough to draw 
good out of evil itself." ^ 

The problem of physical evil is not nearly 
so portentous. This we know, that God 
permits it or sends it for the greater good 
that arises from it, and He triumphs in His 
infinite might and love. Only to those who 
exaggerate the disaster of pain can the dif- 
ficulty seem insoluble. There are greater 
things than freedom from pain; and these 
come forth from the crucible of suffering. 

1 Enchiridion, c. XI. 



92 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

In fact, it may be said of us humans that 
something is wanting to our development, 
if we have not known the purifying in- 
fluence of affliction. Is not devoted sacri- 
fice something of greater value than the 
softness of pampered gratification? Is not 
the hero's magnanimity more noble than 
the sensualist's supine coddling of self? 
There is a tonic in effort, though it hurts: 
there is a worthy pleasure in mounting 
superior to difficulties which try one's very 
soul. When are we most truly men, — when 
we shun the very approach of the disagree- 
able, or when we can ^^ mount on stepping- 
stones of our dead selves to higher things"? 
Nay, all development to what is greater 
is accompanied by pain, if it is not caused 
by it. This is the natural verification of 
the saying of Christ, ^^ Unless the grain of 
wheat falling into the ground die, itself re- 
maineth alone ; but if it die, it bringeth forth 
much fruit. "^ It is another exemplifica- 
tion of the great truth, that ^^he that will 
save his life, shall lose it ; and he that shall 
lose his life . . . shall find it"^ in fuller 

1 John XII, 24, 25. 2 Matt. XVI, 25. 



THE LOED OF THE UNIVERSE 93 

and nobler stature. There is a something 
almost sacramental in suffering nobly en- 
dured, not in sullen silence or stern defiance, 
but in the sacred patience which looks 
beyond the affliction to the purpose for 
which the pain must have been sent. 

The purpose ? Look. We are of human 
mold, not of angelic spirituality; and it is 
human and not angelic service that God de- 
mands of us. But, since we are partly 
material and are subject to the attraction 
of the things of sense, there is danger that 
we may snatch at things low and yile and 
unworthy of our native greatness. It is the 
pruning knife of pain that cuts off the 
shoots which would hold us away from our 
destiny: sufferings can snap the bonds 
which chain us to material and temporal 
things to the oblivion of things spiritual and 
eternal. God sends pain for that. He 
steeps His loved ones in the bitter waters of 
adversity, and by the piercing sharpness of 
humiliation He cuts away the gangrene of 
pride, which would cause corruption by un- 
due self-exaltation and would bring to the 
grave all merit true and real. Oh, yes; 



94 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

quite apart from the inspired wisdom of 
God Himself, Paul was right when he said, 
that God chastises those whom He loves and 
scourges every son whom He receives.^ 

At times w^e see it all. Even amid the 
horrors of a world-devastating war, do we 
not glimpse the good things of untold worth 
that have come to us? In place of the 
spineless lethargy and the self-centred 
egotism, which were paving the way for an 
awful descent of our nation to the abyss of 
destruction, we have seen devotedness and 
sacrifice w^ax stronger under the lash of 
pain. Instead of the imits which in but 
too many instances w^ere anything but con- 
solidated, we have seen the fire of adversity 
w^arm the patriotic love within the nation's 
borders and fuse the bits that were disunited 
into a compact mass, unbroken and (please 
God!) unbreakable. 

As I have said, we cannot grasp the whole 
of God's design. But what we know of 
Him and what we can fathom of His pur- 
pose is enough to make us rest in the peace 
of humility, enough to make us refuse to 

1 Cf. Heb. XII, 6. 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 95 

close our eyes to the big outlines of His 
handiwork just because we cannot recognize 
all the fine points of detail. 

If we stand before a massive piece of ex- 
quisite sculpture, as the murky twilight 
deepens and the setting sun is shining in 
our eyes and not full upon the work of the 
artist, we can see the broad lines of the 
superb masterpiece, — enough to make us 
sure that there is order and beauty in all 
the details that we cannot now discern. 
There in the dusk is an arm apparently not 
joined to a body; there, a branch of a tree 
that seems to be without a parent stock; 
there, a portion of sky which looks like a 
disconnected bit of uncouth marble. But 
we know, that when the light is brighter and 
our eyes are better disposed, we shall see 
only perfection in the great work, whose 
parts that are distinctly visioned give 
promise of what shall be. 

So it is with our knowledge of God's plan 
in the world. We do not see it all; but 
what we see shows us that the Master- Artist 
has done His work well. Some day we shall 
see it all ; and meanwhile we can wait, sure 



96 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

in the conviction that God knows, even if 
we do not comprehend, that He can draw 
the better out of the good and good out of 
evil, that pain and suffering and sorrow are 
often the most sacred tokens of a Father's 
love, although we fail to appreciate their 
value because of the sting of affliction. 

It is precisely this mysteriousness of the 
problem of evil, which has led some to deny 
that there is any evil: it is this very ex- 
aggeration of the utter hatefulness of 
physical pain, which is so deep at the root 
of some other manifestations of pantheistic 
thought that they have won some promin- 
ence for themselves in our time. 

Under this category come the allied 
systems of Christian Science and New 
Thought. I call them systems advisedly, 
and not churches; for, not a few of their 
adepts claim that they are movements, not 
organizations shackled by rigid enactments. 
This can hardly be said with truth of 
Christian Science, though it may be true to 
a larger degree of New Thought, which 
repudiates its dependence upon the older 
body of which it is a schismatical offshoot. 



ji 



THE LOED OF THE UNIVEESE 97 

I wish to note with decisive emphasis that 
I do not intend to attack any of the men 
or women who have given their allegiance 
to either of these systems or movements. 
In all these considerations exposition of the 
truth, and not attack, is and has been my 
object. But truth demands the statement 
that these systems are both in contradiction 
with the rights of God, the Lord of the 
universe. 

With the claims of Christian Science to 
be ^^ scientific" we need not concern our- 
selves. Let it be called that, if its follow^- 
ers so will ; though, how it can be scientific 
to deny the reality of the material world, 
to reject the power of the cognitive faculties 
of attaining truth in normal conditions, to 
come into clashing conflict with principles of 
thought as fundamental as the principle of 
identity and of contradiction, is very hard 
to see. But how it can rightly be called 
*^ Christian," when, whilst professing to 
reverence and honor Christ Jesus, it holds 
itself in opposition, or at least in disre- 
gard as to the fundamental doctrine of 
all Christianity, which is the divinity of 



98 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

Christ, — this is a something more than hard 
to understand. And so too with the more 
recent movement, it is difficult to grasp the 
significance of the name, New Thought, 
since the tenets of the system are as old as 
the vaporings of Oriental error and the 
inventions of theories which have passed 
away. 

One noticeable point is that both 
Christian Science and New Thought place 
^^ Health, Wealth, and Happiness in this 
life'' among what might be called the new 
beatitudes. Both lay supreme stress upon 
the healing of bodily ills and the procuring 
of corporal and mental well-being, as if this 
v/orld were the be-all and end-all of human 
existence; and this surely is not the sum- 
ming up of the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth. 

With the psychological effect of some of 
their methods there is no need to find fault. 
Suggestion, on which they lay such stress, 
may undoubtedly do something ; nay, in cer- 
tain lines it can do a great deal ; but it can- 
not do all. The thinking of '^ joy thoughts" 
will, of course, aid in preserving and in- 
creasing the buoyancy of spirit that is very 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 99 

desirable. The refusal to worry about 
cares that breed and foster anxiety's de- 
structive consequences will make for 
greater gladness and efficiency. But there 
is nothing startlingly new in all this. This 
is very much like the natural effect which 
physicians have known for long years : it is 
very much like the higher influence of the 
sweet joy and cheerful gladness which come 
to one who looks up to heaven with the as- 
surance that all will be well : it is very much 
the same as the old-fashioned spirit of con- 
fidence in God and resignation in the trials 
which come to us from the hands of our 
Father who is in heaven. We have no 
quarrel with these things. 

It is when Christian Science and New 
Thought leave these paths and enter the 
tortuous ways of philosophy and religious 
explanation that they are hopelessly astray. 
Much as the two systems, or as the various 
exponents within the same school, may 
differ from one another as to the reality of 
matter, as to conscious inmiortality in a 
future life, and such vital questions, for all 
that, in their fundamental principles they 



100 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

are sisters of the same family. Both deny 
the divinity of Jesus Christ, except in the 
sense in which we are all divine. And 
there we touch the seat of the disorder. In 
the midst of all the talk about reverence and 
duty and development and endless progress, 
there is the root-error of idealistic panthe- 
ism, which is the destruction of all religion. 
The positive utterances of both Christian 
Science and New Thought are forever ring- 
ing the changes on ^^the One," '^the All- 
Mind,'' ''Father-Mother-God'': it is as- 
serted that there is ''no separation of God 
from man," "there is but one Self, the God 
of All Being, expressed in the Christ," 
"God the Good is all there really is."^ 
Now, all this is pantheism pure and simple. 
Of course, too, it is the subversion of 
Christianity (though, it may be remarked, 
Christianity as such is not now the object of 
our defense), because, whilst Christ is held 
to be divine in a certain sense, it is only in 
the manner in which you and I and all men 
(and all things) are divine. This destroys 
Christianity; for the fundamental doctrine 

iCf. H. Thurston, Month, Oct., Nov., 1917; Jan., 1918. 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 101 

of Christianity is that Christ Jesus is the 
Son of the Eternal Father in a unique and 
incommunicable way in which we are not 
and cannot be the children of God ; that He 
is not only united to the Godhead in a more 
intimate degree than any other man, but in 
a manner altogether different, — a Son by 
nature and not by adoption. 

Yes, the systems are complete pantheism, 
and, as I have said so often, pantheism tolls 
the funeral knell of all religion. For, there 
is no worshiping oneself. There is no bind- 
ing oneself to moral uprightness, just as 
there can be no making oneself. There is 
no reverence for God, since there is no 
rhyme or reason in offering a homage, which 
cannot be withheld, if we are all equally 
determined with the helpless Omnipotent 
One that is driven along by the spur of blind 
necessity ; there is no sense in trying to win 
favor with an implacable, unconscious, im- 
personal monster; there is no justification 
for prayer or propitiation towards the One- 
All that cannot hear and could not help, if 
it heard. 

And as pantheism, in its older form or 



102 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

in its modern adaptations, is the ruin of 
religion, so also is it destructive of right 
reason and subversive of the only principles 
through which one can think and act as an 
intelligent being. It laughs at the root- 
principles of identity and causality; it 
makes something everything, and every- 
thing nothing; it revels in the orgy of 
mental vagaries, v^hose logical end is un- 
bridled licentiousness and depravity, and at 
last death and utter despair. 

And so, we have looked on the true and 
the false ; we have bowed with reverence be- 
fore the great God; we have gazed with 
horror on the Moloch-face of the idol of 
error. From the vision we can clasp to our 
minds and hearts the deeper realization of 
the infinite sublimity of the Creator of all 
things. 

For, God is just that. He is the Supreme 
Being, who alone has within Himself the 
reason of His own existence. He is the 
cause of all that is not Himself; He is dis- 
tinct from the work of His hands, tran- 
scendent and magnificent. He is the ful- 
ness of being, existence itself, intelligent, 



THE LORD OF THE UNIVERSE 103 

living, — a personal God. He is Truth, 
Goodness, Life, Love, Mercy, infinite in all 
the perfections which belong to Him who is. 

The gropings of materialists and panthe- 
ists are pitiable in their tragic insufficiency. 
The very contradictions which spring up 
like noxious weeds along the paths where 
these ^^ outcasts of reason" have passed, 
point to the clean, clear way of truth: the 
grotesqueness of the conflicting claims to 
which they lead with logical necessity, — 
claims that are the death-knell of intellect 
itself, — these afford another proof from 
absurdity of the unshakable truth of the 
existence and attributes of God. 

Man is the other term of the relation of 
religion; for religion is the free depend- 
ence of man on God, and the necessity of re- 
ligion flows forth from the very nature of 
free man as he faces God his Creator. The 
spiritual freedom of immortal man remains 
to be firmly established: the fact of God's 
existence, the reality of His sovereign rights 
over all His creatures we have already 
proved. Over all the heights and depths 
of being God rules; over inanimate and 



104 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

animate nature, irrational and rational, He 
reigns ^Yith divine dominion. All are sub- 
ject to Him; for He is the Lord of the uni- 
verse. 



LECTURE IV 



^^ A LITTLE LESS THAN THE ANGELS '^ 



Freedom of creative act. End of creation. Without 
intelligent creatures the world an insoluble enig- 
ma. Man's nature and dignity the other term of 
relation of religion. Man's soul simple and spir- 
itual. Constant change in man with subsisting 
identity. Thought proves spirituality: grasps 
immaterial realities; abstract knowledge of ma- 
terial things; calculated progress. Man may 
glory in dignity. Free will. Opponents. Root 
of freedom: extent. Ethical argument. Psy- 
chological proof. More thoroughly realized by 
careful scrutiny. Justification of Christian as- 
ceticism. Objections: closed system: conserva- 
tion of energy. 

We have been looking up to God ; we have 
been studying His infinite grandeur and His 
unspeakable majesty. We have gazed on 
the white light of truth and on the blackness 
of error. We have examined the blank 
denials of materialism, which are the dis- 
tortions of fact, and the misty generaliza- 
tions of a pagan pantheism, which are big 
with contradictions and blasphemies. 

105 



106 THE BEDROCK OP BELIEF 

God, the uncaused, the reason of His own 
existence, the designer of the wondrous 
order in this universe of ours; God, exist- 
ence itself, intelligence itself, life itself, love 
itself, — this is the Being, to the knowledge 
of whom we come from the consideration 
of ourselves or the things around us. 
Omnipotent, just and merciful, supremely 
happy, above and beyond the reach of 
change He is, because He is all-perfect and 
pure actuality. Everything that is subject 
to mutation is distinct from Him and de- 
pendent upon Him. He is ^^the Creator of 
heaven and earth,'' ^ the Lord of the uni- 
verse. 

In the exercise of His creative power, 
which brought things forth from the abyss 
of nothingness, God was absolutely free. 
He was led to create these things neither by 
any need of them nor by any duty in their 
regard. He needed them not; for His is 
the unlimited wealth of complete being and 
boundless perfection : He could find nothing 
in creatures that He did not possess, since 
all that they have or can have is derived from 

1 Apostles' Creed. 



MAN^S DIGNITY 107 

His own measureless excellence. He had 
no obligation in their regard ; for He, as the 
fountain-head of all that is good, could have 
no need, and, after all, every duty presup- 
poses some such exigency. God might bind 
Himself in regard to His creatures after He 
has called them into being: He could not 
be held in respect of them when they were 
not. As all-perfection He is the rule of His 
own actions, and this rule could prescribe 
no creation as obligatory upon Him who 
lacks nothing. 

So, the act of creation, by which He is 
the Lord of the universe, is altogether free. 
God was free to create or not to create ; free 
to create the beings that He chose, in the 
circumstances and with the degree of ex- 
cellence that He freely ordained, — although 
the condition of the creature imposed upon 
the work of His hands the limitations and 
imperfections which are the birthmark of 
natures drawn forth from nothingness. 

There is one thing, however, in regard to 
which God was not free, when He fashioned 
the beings of this wondrous world, and that 
is the end for which He made them. He 



108 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

must be their end. And the reason ? This. 
Every intelligent being, as we know, must 
act for a purpose. For that matter, so too 
must non-intelligent beings. But in the 
case of these last the relation of means to the 
end is not grasped by them and the end is 
ordained for them not by themselves, but 
by some outside intelligent cause; whereas 
intelligent beings act for the end which they 
themselves perceive and to which they deter- 
mine themselves. Hence, God, as supreme 
intelligence and infinite wisdom, must have 
had an end in \dew when He spoke the fiat 
of omnipotence ; and because He is God, that 
end must have been worthy of His God- 
head. 

What end is worthy of God? Only God 
Himself. That is quite clear; and so too 
it is patent that God must have directed 
everything to His own blessed self. ^^ Be- 
ing the Supreme Good, He has the right to 
all honor, and He demands it because He 
has for Himself the esteem which is due to 
the Sovereign Good."^ To do otherwise 
would be to disregard His own Deity; and 

1 Scheeben. 



MAN'S DIGNITY 109 

that would be to destroy Himself who is 
above the reach of ruin. Thus to order all 
to Himself is not selfish egotism. It is 
propriety and justice and strict right ; nay, 
it is necessity. Yet, once again, it is no 
searching after individual advantage or 
personal profit. Such things God gives 
away : with munificent hand He lavishes the 
largess of the benefits of creation upon the 
creatures that are the effect of His pouring 
forth His infinite goodness. To creatures 
the profit ; but to God the glory, because He 
is God. 

Because infinite excellence is incapable 
of augmentation, the intrinsic glory of the 
Godhead cannot receive any increase; and 
so, God's essential glory is not the end of 
the creative act. The only things then, that 
remains is that He created because of His 
extrinsic glory, which is the manifestation 
of this internal and infinite sublimity, so 
that it can be known and magnified by His 
creatures. This point is worthy of em- 
phasis : God created the world that it might 
manifest His greatness and wisdom and 
goodness; that it might lead to the knowl- 



110 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

edge which would find its way to praise and 
reverence and service. And therefore God 
made man as He did make him, "sl little less 
than the angels." ^ 

Without the presence of intelligent 
creatures this great world of ours with all 
its beauty and magnificence and majesty 
and overwhelming vastness is an unex- 
plained and unexplainable enigma : with the 
existence of reasonable beings the riddle of 
the universe is solved, and the place of re- 
ligion is assured. As we saw in the begin- 
ning, religion is the free dependence of man 
upon God. We have proved the existence 
of God; and one term of the relation is 
secured. But this is not enough. There 
is another term, — and this is free man. 

If man were entirely like the material 
objects that surround him; if he were no 
higher than the brute creation ; if he did not 
have the power to know and love, and hence 
to praise and reverence and serve, there 
could be no question of religion. Depend- 
ent he would be upon his Maker ; but, if he 
were not intelligent, there could be no 

1 Ps. VIII, 6. 



MAN'S DIGNITY 111 

recognition of this dependence. Further- 
more, with his faculty of reason he would be 
consciously dependent upon the Lord of all, 
even if he did not have the power of self- 
determination ; but it would not be the 
meritorious dependence of religion. Un- 
less he were, as he is, the master of his 
powers, the architect of his destiny, the 
ruler of his life, he could not give to God 
the free human worship, which is the soul of 
religion in this world of ours. It is because 
man is what he is, that he can and must wor- 
ship God by the cult of religious adoration. 
At present, then, let us consider some of 
the fundamental truths about man's nature 
and dignity : let us steady ourselves against 
the attacks of those who would steal away 
man's birthright of glory. When they deny 
his spiritual intelligence or his self-deter- 
mining liberty, they degrade him from the 
height to which his Maker elevated him; 
from his throne they hurl him down into the 
depths. God made man "a little less than 
the angels," and gave him dominion over 
the things round about him, to the end that 
he might use them as a master, not serve 



112 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

them as an abject slave, that with upright 
head and noble heart he might walk humbly 
amidst the things of earth the uncrowned 
sovereign in the universe of which God is 
the supreme Lord. 

First of all, in treating of man's nature 
and dignity, a few words about the sim- 
plicity and spirituality of the soul of man. 
It is hardly necessary for us to prove that we 
have a soul ; for none but the most confirmed 
materialists could deny that. These mate- 
rialists do deny it. Spencer, for instance 
(and his followers are not a few among so- 
called scientists), says that the most mar- 
velous living organism is nothing more than 
a complicated mechanism. He holds that 
the activities of an oyster or a bird, of a 
worm or a genius, of a cyclone or a hero, of 
a bacillus or a saint, are different only in 
degree and not in kind. This is practically 
to deny life altogether. It is to assert that, 
after all, animate things are only machines, 
and that even man is a mere automaton. 

The theory is scientifically untenable, even 
with reference to the lower forms of life. 
For, machines do not grow, do not repair in- 



MAN'S DIGNITY 113 

jury to themselveSj do not multiply and pro- 
duce other machines. In all these activities 
a something distinct from the physical and 
chemical forces that are at work, is neces- 
sary as an elevating and directing energy. 

But whatever may be said of the absurdity 
of the theory in connection with the lower 
forms of life, as applied to man it is blinded 
prejudice gone mad. The soul is the prin- 
ciple of life, the root-force of volition and 
thought ; and the fact that we will and that 
we think of a thousand and one things is as 
undeniable a certainty, as that we move our 
hands and feet. Our ideas rise in our minds 
as really as the blades of grass spring up 
from the fertile earth; they illumine the 
darkness as truly as does the sun in the vault 
of heaven. These thoughts are real ; and if 
they are real, so too is the ultimate principle 
of thought, — and this ultimate principle of 
thought is preciselj^ what we mean by the 
soul. That soul is a substantial reality ; for 
it is part of man's nature, which is without 
doubt substantial, since it is the subject 
and support of modifications and accidental 
changes. 



114 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

It is important, as against the false posi- 
tion of the materialists, to establish the solid 
fact that this soul of ours is simple and spir- 
itual. 

It is simple, that is to say, immaterial. 
Material we may take for what is extended 
and impenetrable and composed of parts: 
what is immaterial is free from these con- 
ditions. It is not palpable ; it cannot be seen 
with the eyes or grasped by the hands; it 
cannot be painted or drawn or, for that mat- 
ter, imagined; but it can be conceived in 
thought. And the human soul is of this 
character. 

But it is even more; for it is spiritual. 
This means that its existence, whilst depend- 
ent on God and on Him alone, is not proxi- 
mately dependent upon the body, but is from 
itself : it means that its activity and its being 
are not so bound to its material partner, that 
it cannot act or live without it. The soul is 
in the body; but it is not in it as a chair is 
in a room, as a treasure is in a safe, no, nor 
as a prisoner is in a jail. It is united with 
the body in such a manner that there are not 
two distinct entities, but one compound be- 



MAN^S DIGNITY 115 

ing that is man. The souPs causality with 
regard to the body (for it has causality and 
exercises it) is not efficient, for it does not 
make the body; it is formal, for it commu- 
nicates definite reality to its material con- 
sort. In man the soul elevates the material 
powers, making them capable of sense- 
perception, and, beyond this, it lifts up the 
sensitive faculties, so as to bridge over the 
abyss between sensation and intellectual 
cognition. Yet the soul transcends the 
body, and acts and lives in a manner intrin- 
sically independent of it. 

These are statements. But are they 
true ? Unfailingly true. And the reasons ? 
To begin with, the simplicity of the soul, 
as against the materialists, is conclusively 
proved from the fact that we have sensa- 
tions, in which by one perception we grasp 
an entire object. However, I do not intend 
to dwell on this argument because of its ab- 
stract technicality. But we can see the 
same truth quite clearly from the following 
simple consideration. 

Scientists affirm, and materialists are 
among the most ardent advocates of the es- 



116 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

tablished fact, that all the parts of the body, 
even the most solid and resistant, are being 
perpetually decomposed and carried away 
on the flood of life. Make the time seven 
years, as the common notion has it ; make it 
thirty days, as some maintain it to be : what- 
ever the lapse of time, it is quite certain that 
at this moment there is not in us a single 
atom of matter which was there in the days 
of our childhood. Yet for all that, we are 
the same, and we are conscious of our iden- 
tity. In our recollections we can go back 
to different things that have happened to us : 
we are quite sure, not only about various in- 
ternal conditions which have affected us, but 
of external circumstances which have had 
to do with our identical selves. In spite of 
all the changes in us and around us we are 
immovably conscious of a something that 
has remained constant, unshaken, unaltered. 
We can say: ^^I was sad, and I am glad; 
I was ignorant, and I have learned many 
things ; I was a child, and I am a man or a 
woman." This ^^I" has remained through- 
out all our existence, — and we know it. 
What then? Why, this. Since there is 



MAN'S DIGNITY 117 

nothing material in ns which has lasted 
throngh it all, there must be something im- 
material^ incorporeal, that has remained 
without mutation and is the reason of our 
substantial identity throughout the whole 
process. That something is the soul, dis- 
tinct from matter and simple. 

But this is not all. The soul of man is not 
only simple and immaterial. That may be 
said of the vital principle of the brute. 
Man's soul is more than that : it is spiritual. 
This is a thing immeasurably greater ; this 
lies closer to the root of man's dignity; this 
lifts him up very near to the angels. 

And how is the fact of this spirituality, 
this independence from matter established ? 
From the nature of the activities of the soul ; 
for from the operations of a being we can 
rightly argue to the nature of that being. 
If in man there is an activity to which the 
soul alone can mount and which it can ac- 
complish as the sole agent, free from intrin- 
sic dependence, isolated, and transcending 
any and all material conditions, then by the 
very nature that God has given it the exist- 
ence of that soul is transcendent and free 



118 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

from all intrinsic dependence upon matter. 
Now, the activity which thus points out 
the inner nature of the soul, is thought. 
Thought proves the spirituality of the hu- 
man soul. 

In the first place, thought grasps realities 
which are absolutely immaterial; and since 
the effect cannot be above its cause, the prin- 
ciple from which these thoughts proceed 
cannot be dependent upon matter : as its ob- 
ject is immaterial, it too must be spiritual. 
No one can deny that we do actually think of 
things of this character. We think of truth, 
goodness, virtue, gratitude, love, devoted- 
ness, patriotism. We think of spirituality, 
of angels : we think of God, who is above and 
beyond any material limitations, and we 
prove His existence. 

Yes, we think of all these; and unques- 
tionably they are all realities. But are they 
bodies ? Are they material ? Absurd ! We 
do not define self-sacrificing devotedness in 
terms of length and breadth and depth ; we 
do not say that it is so long or that it weighs 
so much or that it is so many thirds or 
fourths of something else. If we would un- 



MAN^S DIGNITY 119 

derstand patriotism, we speak of the love in 
the inmost centre of a man's soul which 
makes him so prize his country, that he joy- 
ously pours forth upon the altar of sacrifice 
his labors and sufferings and his heart's best 
blood. We may compare it to a fire that 
flames or to a heart that throbs, but, after all, 
we cannot reduce it to units that may be 
touched by the hand or seen by the eye of 
flesh. And so of the rest of these spiritual 
realities of which we think. They are alto- 
gether cut off from material conditions ; and 
the thought which grasps them is equally 
immaterial and free from the thraldom of 
matter. It is a force independent and tran- 
scendent in its nature and existence, as in its 
manner of activity. It is spiritual. 

The fact that we have these thoughts of 
immaterial realities is quite unconditioned 
by the system by which we explain the man- 
ner in which these ideas arise. Let the ideas 
be inborn, infused into the soul from the 
dawn of its creation; let them be derived 
from the beginnings of sense-perception : the 
fact remains that they are there, the concepts 
of spiritual realities, — and that is all that is 



120 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

necessary for our argument. As a matter 
of concrete fact the mind of man does re- 
ceive from the senses the elements on which 
it begins to exercise its activity: it is true 
that the imagination goes before intellectual 
cognition in the fashioning of primitive 
ideas. But what of it ? This, indeed, shows 
that the soul is made for union with the 
body ; but it proves nothing against the self- 
subsistence of the soul. 

The process of spiritual thought begins in 
sense-perception? Yes ; but it does not end 
there. If a man were to start on a journey 
from here to the war-torn lands of Europe, 
he would of course begin the trip by land : he 
would board a train bound for the East. 
But what sort of a fool would he be, if he 
were to maintain, that therefore the whole 
journey from this place to the heart of bleed- 
ing France must be made by land, that there 
is no water between here and there, and that 
America and Europe are but one continent. 
It matters not where thought begins ; the im- 
portant point is where it ends, — and it ends 
in spirituality. 

But, besides the fact that we think of im- 



MAN^S DIGNITY 121 

material things, there is the other fact that 
even in thinking of things that are material 
we do so in an immaterial manner. As our 
personal experience testifies, our knowledge 
of things is not intuitive, but deductive : we 
do not directly grasp the essence of anything, 
but come to the abstract knowledge of it by 
reasoning back from the qualities with which 
it is clothed. Think, for example, of a 
church ; think of a pew ; or think of a tree, 
from the wood of which the pew is made. 
Surely a tree is a material object ; but we do 
not think of it in a material way. We imag- 
ine, just as we paint, this or that tree ; but we 
think of ^^tree'' in general, in the abstract; 
and in the material order of things such a 
universal, abstract tree does not exist sepa- 
rated from all the conditions which particu- 
larize it in its concrete existence. 

And the wonder is, that among the con- 
cepts, of which our thoughts about such a 
material thing as a tree are formed, there are 
many whose object has absolutely nothing to 
do with matter. Take the idea of ^^tree'^ 
and analyse it. What do we find? It is a 
being, substantial, li\ing, of such and such a 



122 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

kind. But, being ? That says nothing at all 
about matter; for there are many beings 
quite apart from matter. Substance? 
Again, not a shadow of a material concept. 
Li^dng? Nor here do we find the traces of 
anything material. And thus our thoughts 
about the most material of objects are ab- 
stract, and have many elements that are no 
more material than would be found in 
thoughts about a pure spirit. That is 
the second proof of the spirituality of the 
soul. 

We might add another convincing proof 
from the fact that the soul can think of its 
own thoughts; for this consciousness of its 
own thought shows that the soul has an activ- 
ity in which the body has no immediate part 
and no direct intervention. But, without 
dwelling on this, we can conclude this part of 
our consideration by calling attention to 
man's conscious and calculated progress 
along the highways and byways of science 
up to the heights of the arts of civilization. 

Man not only knows immaterial things, 
and material things in an immaterial man- 
ner; he not only has concepts which are di- 



MAN^S DIGNITY 123 

vorced from the particularizing circum- 
stances of time and place and concrete ex- 
istence: lie also formulates principles and 
axioms, and with these as torches to his feet 
along the darkness of the road he marches 
on to triumph. He learns himself and his 
activities and the laws of these activities ; he 
learns the material universe and the laws 
that govern its wondrous workings ; he learns 
much about other intelligent beings and of 
their manner of living ; he has invented the 
signs of speech for the interchange of 
thoughts with his fellows; he has mounted 
up to the great Cause of all and with the 
arms of knowledge and love has embraced 
God Himself. And whilst worshiping the 
Lord of nature, he has mastered nature it- 
self ; he has bridled the powers of inanimate 
creation to serve his will and to labor for his 
advantage. Neither height nor depth nor 
solitude nor vastness has crushed the audac- 
ity of his daring spirit. He has conquered 
the earth and the fulness thereof by the 
might of his intelligent soul. And such a 
soul is spiritual. 
Well may man glory in his dignity, though 



124 THE BEDROCK OP BELIEF 

he should not glory as if he had not received 
from God all that he has and is. Great is 
man, with a greatness beyond the magnifi- 
cence of aught that is material. As he gazes 
into the measureless depths of the spanning 
skies and sees the golden sands of starlit 
glory on the shores of a boundless space, he 
can hold his head high ; for his sweep of in- 
tellect goes out beyond the farthest sun and 
reaches unto the infinite. In his physical 
weakness he may bend before the crash of 
the tornado or the rush of the whirlwind; 
but he need not quail, for he can harness the 
power of earth to his chariot of progress and 
go on to new conquests. He may turn his 
awed eyes to the beauty of earth, which is the 
jeweled footstool of the Omnipotent; but he 
need not be abashed, for from his own mind 
and heart, colored by fancy, he can ^^body 
forth the forms of things unknown and give 
to airy nothing a local habitation and a 
name," and can thrill the souls of men with 
the higher love-tinged beauty of thought and 
art. Little world as he is, and only little as 
compared in his physical powers with the 
great universe, man can look undaunted at 



MAN'S DIGNITY 125 

it all ; for he is greater than it all by as much 
as the spiritual transcends the material. 

And the aureola of his glory shines still 
more brightly, Man can front unbroken the 
onsets of nature and of his fellow-mortals; 
he can look undismayed on the ghastly visage 
of disaster or death ; he can stand unmoved 
amidst the crash of worlds. He can hurl his 
defiance into the face of earth and hell ; nay, 
he can stand up before the great God Him- 
self and say ^^I will" or ^^I will not.'' For, 
his simple, spiritual soul is free. Here is 
the reality of most tremendous import : here 
is the fact of immense consequence to us in 
our investigation of the necessity of religion. 
To say that through the will the soul is free 
is to assert that it has the power of self- 
determination, that its activities are not ne- 
cessitated by forces outside of itself, that, 
placed before an act with all the prerequi- 
sites for action present, it can act or not ac- 
cording to its own choice. 

Although the consequences of the denial 
of free will are simply appalling, it is 
strange how far that denial has spread, 
whether under the name of fatalism or of 



126 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

determinism in its many forms. Of course, 
the most uncompromising opponents of free 
will are the materialists of different stripe, 
who deny the spirituality of the soul. Yet 
idealists too have fallen into the same error. 
Thus, Kant with his impassable abyss be- 
tween the world of experience and the world 
of thought, whilst admitting as a postulate 
a transcendental freedom, as the foundation 
of religion and morality, denies this liberty 
in the world of experience. For him, man's 
whole life, as revealed in actual experience 
to himself and others, is rigidly determined. 

After all, the materialists are more logical 
in this matter; for, to reject the liberty of 
the human soul it is necessary to deny its 
spirituality, since man's freedom flows forth 
from the spiritual nature of his human soul. 

The thinking, spiritual soul of man con- 
ceives not only such or such a concrete good, 
but abstract, universal, absolute, perfect 
good. Now, on the one hand, the infinite 
good, which alone could exhaust the desir- 
ability contained in goodness, is not ade- 
quately comprehended in this life, and there- 
fore cannot exert what would be a necessitat- 



MAN^S DIGNITY 127 

ing influence upon the spirit of man. On the 
other hand, no finite good can force the will 
to a choice, because, not realizing in itself the 
full ideal of goodness, but presenting some 
imperfection which may be the occasion of 
the will's drawing back, it can never conquer 
the resistance of a faculty whose adequate 
object is universal and perfect good. Good 
in general is of vaster extent and more pre- 
cious value than any particular finite good. 
If, because it is an abstraction, it cannot it- 
self be the object of any effective choice, 
though the mainspring of every volition, still 
it can keep the will back from any particu- 
lar finite good, which would connote a re- 
striction of the scope of the wilPs activities. 
The will, it need hardly be said, cannot 
choose without some motive ; for freedom of 
choice is not irrational activity, nor is it 
license gone mad. Some good must be pre- 
sented by the intellect. But in the presence 
of any finite good, and even before the in- 
finite good imperfectly apprehended as it is 
in our present state, the will is free to act 
or not to act, according to its own self- 
determination. The free act is not a ' ' cause- 



128 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

less volition/^ as some have called it. The 
will is the cause, not of course of itself, but 
of its act of free election by the tremendous 
power that likens it unto the uncaused Deity. 

Neither is it asserted that we are free in 
all our actions. There are spontaneous ac- 
tivities. There are actions which follow the 
path of least resistance, either as the result 
of negligence or as the effect of habits that 
we have formed. Here too, however, the 
acts may be reductively free. But the point 
is, that in our conscious activities, where in- 
terests of greater moment are at stake, we 
unquestionably do exercise this power of 
self-determination and are the masters of 
our own deeds. 

Though we may not be able to explain how 
we determine ourselves by our free choice, 
we need not turn away from the solid fact 
that we do thus determine ourselves. We 
are fools, if we deny electricity to be a fact 
because we cannot explain it : we are fools, if 
we reject the fact of thought because there 
are difficulties in the explanation of the ori- 
gin of ideas: we are fools, if we repudiate 
the fact of life because we cannot lay bare 



MAN'S DIGNITY 129 

all the mysteries that lie hidden beneath the 
surface. We should be just as foolish, if we 
were to cast aside the fact of liberty because 
the whole of the process of freedom is not 
clear to us. It is facts that we are facing, 
not theories. And the fact is that we are 
free. 

The first proof of this fact is found in the 
consent of mankind at large, as manifested 
in their ethical notions and convictions. 
There is no denying that duty, moral obliga- 
tion, responsibility, and the like are ideas 
which the world over and at all times are 
actually present in the minds of normally 
developed men. These notions imply their 
conviction that man is master of his actions. 
To say that he is not only affected by hered- 
ity and environment, but is positively and in- 
evitably necessitated by them, is to fly in the 
face of the consent of all mankind. 

All sane men, unless touched by the senti- 
mentality which would reduce all crime to a 
disease, or by the absurdity which would re- 
duce all heroic effort to the necessary out- 
come of physical or psychic causes, say that 
a man deserves reprobation and punishment 



130 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

for outrageous enormities and praise and re- 
ward for self-sacrificing heroism. We do 
not blame or praise a beast or an insane man 
for actions of whatever kind, though we may 
defend ourselves against injury from either 
of them. And all this is to say that man is 
responsible for his actions in such a way 
that he is truly their author. So true is all 
this, that determinists themselves are forced 
to admit that men mean precisely this when 
they use the terms to which we have re- 
ferred ; but, they add, it is all a gross delusion 
and must all be changed. Their very ad- 
mission condemns them ; for, if all mankind 
is hopelessly wrong, then men are incapable 
of attaining truth; and to hold this is to 
clasp the mocking demon of scepticism to 
one's heart and to commit intellectual sui- 
cide. 

What morality becomes in the hands of the 
determinists we shall consider more at length 
in the following lecture ; but the sight is hor- 
rible to contemplate and paralyzing to dwell 
upon. They make God Himself the author 
of all sin, or they deny sin and make it of 
parallel value with virtue. To them a Bene- 



MAN'S DIGNITY 131 

diet Arnold or a Washington is of equal 
worth ; a Nero or a Peter and a Paul ; a mon- 
ster drunk with the blood of mankind or a 
hero who pours forth his life in defense of 
home and country; a licentious profligate 
ravening like a beast of prey or an unstained 
maiden preferring death to dishonor. To 
them it is all one ; for after all man is nothing 
but a higher brute, — or lower, because of his 
faculty of devising more degrading excesses 
than even a beast could crave. Deny lib- 
erty'? This is to tear away the gates that 
hold back the flood of defilement ; it is to in- 
vite all men to lust like unchained bestials 
and to go down to utter degradation and de- 
spair. Thank God ! the whole wide world of 
men and women, in spite of exceptions that 
are blots upon the scutcheon of the race, have 
been wiser than the theorists and have clung 
to the truth of man's freedom. 

And this persuasion of theirs is not an in- 
stance pf the wish being father to the 
thought. It is but an example of careful at- 
tention to the testimony of consciousness it- 
self ; for we are conscious that we are free. 
We deliberate before placing acts of serious 



132 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

importance ; we weigh the motives which we 
have for one or other course of conduct. 
When we choose, we are conscious not only 
of what we do, but of how we do it, and we 
feel that while doing one thing, we could 
have done the other. When we have chosen, 
we still consider that we have determined 
ourselves to the line of conduct adopted ; we 
experience either satisfaction or remorse, 
according to our voluntary election of what 
was worthy or unworthy; we distinguish 
quite clearly between acts in which we deem 
ourselves free and those which are altogether 
beyond our control. 

All this is true, and it is only more thor- 
oughly realized by a careful scrutiny of the 
acts wherein liberty of choice is exercised. 

In the icy waters of a freezing lake forty 
champions of Christ's religion stand brav- 
ing the blasts of a wintry storm in testimony 
of their loyalty to Him who died for them. 
On the shore the guards keep watch, and 
have in readiness warm baths and solacing 
comforts for any of the warriors who will 
forswear his allegiance to his heavenly 
King. Endless hour drags on after endless 



MAN'S DIGNITY 133 

hour, and the fight goes on. To the end 
thirty-nine heroes face the foe, looking 
calmly at the death of freezing torture. 
But they could not help it ? They could not 
do otherwise? Look! One stumbling fig- 
ure (but one, thank God!) comes out of the 
freezing waters, steps forth upon the shore, 
holds trembling hands towards warmth and 
comfort and life, — a traitor to his cause. 
But he could not help it ? He could do noth- 
ing else ? The traitor gives the lie to those 
who would belittle the martyrs' glory: the 
martyrs' fidelity brands the traitor with the 
mark of shame. 

A plague is raging in a country, and death 
is cutting its victims down with relentless 
sickle. The dead are lying unburied; the 
living are tottering on the brink of the grave, 
but clamor for assistance to soul and body. 
A physician looks upon his home and loved 
ones, and from the sight turns his tearful 
eyes to the helpless stricken ones. A minis- 
ter of God hears the call of the wounded err- 
ing ones of the Master. Both go into the pit 
of death. But they could not help it ? It is 
false! They know as they face their de- 



134 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

struction, that, had they wished it, they 
might have chosen the easier way. 

Over in what has been called ^^the white 
hell" of the trenches, in the biting cold of 
freezing mud and chilling rain during the 
days just past, many a stout-hearted hero in 
khaki has been facing the foe. Personal 
discomfort, the agony of long days and 
nights in the teeth of the storm and the riot 
of shot and shell are motives enough for a 
craven soul to get away from it all, if only 
the danger of detection and the biting stroke 
of punishment are precluded. But the call 
of duty and the voices of loved ones for 
whom he is braving everything and the 
strong urging of loyalty to country that 
thrills his heart, — all these say, ^^ Stand!" 
There may come the temptation to end it all 
by going over to the enemy, by an undetected 
flight, perhaps by the sharp, quick way of 
self-destruction ; but he fights it down after 
facing the issue squarely. Does he go the 
coward's way ? If he does, it is with the full 
consciousness that he is doing what he might 
not have done. Does he stand ? The thou- 
sands do, — God bless them ! — and they know 



MAN^S DIGNITY 135 

that they might, had they chosen, have been 
faithless to their trust. 

To say that all these must follow the 
strongest motive and must go the way of the 
greatest attraction is hideously false, unless 
one misuses words, and calls the strongest 
motive and the greatest attraction that 
which one actually chooses. But to say that, 
is to say that one wills what he wills; and 
this, as a statement of scientific explanatory 
value, is sheer nonsense. 

So, man is free. Need I add, that one can 
strengthen this peerless joower of freedom 
by the exercise of self-control? Of course 
he can. In proportion as a man yields to 
instinctive inclination and denies himself 
none of the satisfaction which he knows he 
can deny himself if he will, in the same pro- 
portion does he diminish his power of self- 
determination and sink into a kind of self- 
imposed slavery. And the more he re- 
strains mere impulse and schools himself to 
command himself in the midst of the allure- 
ments of pleasure, the more does he grow 
into the full stature of the freedom, which is 
the noblest prerogative of true manhood. 



136 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

The natural justification this, of Christian 
asceticism. 

Before concluding it may be well to say 
just a word about two basic objections 
against both the spirituality and the free- 
dom of the soul, very common among ^^sci- 
entists." Two principles are adduced, 
which fight against both these prerogatives 
of the soul. There is what is called ^'the 
principle of the closed system," and there is 
the other principle called ^^the principle of 
the conservation of energy." The x)rinciple 
of the closed system may mean many things, 
some admissible, some destructively false. 
If one takes it as a working hypothesis of 
physical science, according to which it is 
wise to look for a material cause for a ma- 
terial effect, there is no reason to find serious 
fault with it. But to look upon it as a prin- 
ciple of universal application, which ex- 
cludes extra-cosmic and spiritual activity 
from the material world, is to go too far. 
This is not scientific ; for it goes beyond ob- 
served and observable facts. In this last 
sense, the postulate of ^'the closed system" 
(for it is only a postulate, and can never be 



MAN'S DIGNITY 137 

proved) must be repudiated in the name of 
sound logic ; for logic has never reached such 
a conclusion, since it has no premises that 
lead to it. It must be rejected in the 
name of honest observation ; for observation 
proves quite the contrary. To mention but 
one fact, the results of the spiritual ideals 
in this workaday world demonstrate the 
actual influence of forces that are beyond the 
sphere and the power of matter. 

The cognate principle of ^Hhe conserva- 
tion of energy, ' ' which is the very ' ' Achilles ' ' 
of determinists and materialists, asserts the 
constancy of the sum-total of energy in the 
universe, and therefore excludes any spir- 
itual factors from modifying the march of 
events. This is either an obvious begging 
of the question, or it affords not the slightest 
objection against the spiritual forces modi- 
fying the quality of the energy in the world, 
even whilst leaving constant the quantity, 
which, so far as its availability is concerned, 
is ever tending to dissipation. 

Furthermore, both of these principles, as 
directed against the soul, have been refuted 
by the fact of the existence and the activity 



138 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

of the spiritual freedom of the soul. It will 
not, then, be necessary to delay upon these 
considerations. The fact stands out big and 
unmistakable, that, no matter what the the- 
orists may hold, the spiritual will of man 
does determine itself, — and man is free. 

If some of these reflections, technical in 
their philosophical subtlety, are lacking in 
the personal appeal that touches the emo- 
tions of our souls, let us take heart from the 
thought, that, if their consideration has been 
a labor, it may well be called a labor of love 
in the cause of trath. True religion is based 
upon sound philosophy. If we doubt it, 
conviction should be driven into our minds 
by the proud, but unfomided, boasts of one 
of the most self-assertive of the adversaries 
of all religion and all morality. Ernst 
Haeckel glories that his much vaunted 
monistic view of the universe ^' marks the 
highest intellectual progress, in that it defi- 
nitely rules out the three central dogmas of 
metaphysics — God, freedom and inmiortal- 
ity."^ ^ 

God, liberty, immortality gone ? God be 

iT/ie Riddle of the Universe, p. 232. 



MAN'S DIGNITY 139 

praised ! — that is false. The immortality of 
man is included in his spiritual freedom, 
and this has been established with the cer- 
tainty with which we have proved the exist- 
ence and attributes of God. 

God the Creator and man the free and re- 
sponsible creature, — there is the heart of 
religion. Eight reason evidently requires 
that man should live out in his life of con- 
scious effort the relation pointed out by the 
condition of his being. He is dependent on 
God and he is free with the liberty which is 
his patent of greatness; and therefore he 
should bow down before that God in the de- 
liberate joyous praise and humble reverence 
and worshipful service that spell religion. 

That he not only should do so, but is bound 
by an inflexible obligation so to act, we shall 
consider in the next lecture; but it all fol- 
lows from what we have thus far established. 
God is God; and man, who is but "a little 
less than the angels," is most a man, when 
he is great enough to employ his God-given 
liberty in so shaping his course of life as to 
make himself worthy of the God who gave 
him all that he has and all that he is. 



LECTURE V 

THE BOND BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH 

Proper for man to profess religion. Must he do it? 
Meaning of moral law. It exists. False theories. 
Kant: divorce of religion from morality. Moral 
Evolution. Its supreme canon specified in its 
^^pentalogue." Five gratuitous assumptions. 
Consequences of system. The truth. Outline. 
Direction to end: irrational beings: reasonable 
creatures. God's manifested will the reason of 
obligation. To break this moral bond is to bind 
self in chains of slavery. 

A proverb has it that ^^ order is heaven's 
first law.'' That, no doubt, is true of 
heaven; but it is also true that order is 
earth's first law as well. Disturbance and 
confusion are not only the bugbears of a 
nervous temperament; they are evils from 
which we fly by the instinctive force of our 
nature. ^^ Anarchy" and ^^ chaos" are two 
of the most damning terms of reprobation 
for any system, whether physical, intellec- 

140 



THE MORAL BOND 141 

tual, or moral. Now, from the considera- 
tions that have occupied us up to the present 
we see quite clearly what right order re- 
quires of man in relation to God. 

God, the self-existent and all-perfect Be- 
ing, the cause of all that is outside of Him- 
self, sublime in His personality, has acted 
as He freely willed to act and has drawn 
forth from the abyss of nothingness the 
whole of the big, wide world. In this world 
is man, — ^man with his greatness and his 
capabilities ; with his spiritual soul, which in 
its activities and therefore in its existence is 
intrinsically independent of the body it ani- 
mates ; with his intellect that can grasp im- 
material truth and even the infinitude of 
truth, which is God ; with his free will that 
has the awful resemblance to God's un- 
caused being, whereby it can decide itself to 
a course of action without extrinsic deter- 
mination. Man is indeed a ^^ microcosm," 
a little world in himself, just as he is the 
apex of perfection in the world that falls 
under the senses: he is in verv truth but '^sl 
little less than the angels." But with all 
his greatness, which is woven into the woof 



142 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

of his littleness, he is the creature of the 
great God. 

As a creature of the Most High he is es- 
sentially and irrevocably dependent upon 
God. The realization of this truth at once 
makes it e^ddent to every right thinking 
man, that order requires that man should 
live in accordance with this dependence. It 
is according to his nature, it is proper, it is 
desirable, it is good for him to live as a crea- 
ture, but as a creature endowed with free- 
dom. In a word, it is altogether the appro- 
priate thing for him to profess religion, 
which is man's free dependence upon God. 

But this is not yet the end of the matter. 
Is this not only a proper thing for man to 
do ; but is it more than that ? Must he do it ? 
Is he bound to do it ? Quite e^ddently he is 
physically free to do otherwise; and the 
wretched experience of what we see around 
us and have gathered from the record of 
history has shown us and does show us, that, 
as a matter of concrete fact, many men do 
actually refuse to live out in their lives this 
free dependence upon their Creator. 

Yes, man is physically free with regard to 



THE MORAL BOND 143 

religion. But is lie or is he not morally 
bound to worship and serve God? The an- 
swer is, that beyond all question he is bound 
to profess religion. And the reason of the 
necessity is the moral law, ^^The Bond Be- 
tween Heaven and Earth. ' ' 

Let us consider this moral law, especially 
as it applies to the necessity of man's wor- 
ship of God ; for this worship of God is the 
main object of our considerations in this 
course of lectures. 

The existence of the moral law means that 
in His infinite wisdom God has seen the way, 
in which man, by the orderly activity which 
will attain his true happiness, is to be led to 
give to God the glory that was the object of 
God's creative act; and that He has imposed 
this line of conduct upon man with the force 
of the divine will binding the will of the 
creature to the established order. All law, 
in fact, is the exact rule or standard or norm, 
by which a being is moved to action or held 
back from it. That nature is ruled by con- 
stant and universal laws is the axiom that 
lies at the base of all investigation in the 
physical world. The forces and tendencies 



144 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

to a constant and fixed mode of activity, im- 
planted in material things by the Creator, 
are the expression and the effect of the will 
of the intelligent Being who is the Lord of 
the universe. But in a stricter sense law 
applies only to rational beings, who are di- 
rected in their moral activities by a compel- 
ling force, which whilst necessitating is con- 
sonant with their freedom. Obligation, im- 
posed by the will of the superior, is the es- 
sential element of real and strict law, and 
binds the will of the subject to actions which 
make for the common good. 

If there is such a thing as a moral law; 
if there is such a thing as God commanding 
under moral necessity the observance of 
order in the world ; if the universal consent 
of mankind is right, as it must be, when it 
recognizes the notions of duty, guilt, re- 
morse, reward and retribution, then the 
most fundamental precept of that law must 
regard man's attitude towards God, and is 
thus the basis of all other obligations of 
whatever kind. Now, there is a moral law, 
and it comes from God. God has written it 
in the hearts of men ; He has manifested it in 



THE MORAL BOND 145 

the dictates of conscience ; He has placed it 
as the norm according to which man must 
live and according to which he must be 
judged by the Lord of all. 

As this matter is of such immense impor- 
tance, it will profit us to look at it in some 
detail. We shall, therefore, examine both 
the false and the true explanation of the un- 
doubted and undenied fact of the existence 
of the moral notions of right and wrong and 
duty and obligation, which all men have. 

In examining the false theories it will not 
be necessary to review the tenets of the ma- 
terialist philosophers of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, who in the pursuit of pleasure tried to 
revive the pagan principles of Epicurus. 
From the gross sensualism of this school the 
pendulum swung back until it touched the 
intellectualism of Kant. 

For Kant the root of all authority and the 
final source of obligation was found in rea- 
son itself. In his system reason obliges of 
itself : it places the law and is autonomous, 
and the absolute form in which it issues 
its commands is the categoric imperative, 
^^Act! and so act, that thy act be fit for law 



146 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

■aniversal. " We are obliged to fulfill the 
law simply and solely for the law itself and 
because it is the law of our reason. To do 
anything because someone else has placed 
the necessity upon us, even though that other 
be the great God Himself, is out-and-out im- 
morality. 

Now, in such a system obligation is for- 
ever an insoluble riddle. For, if man binds 
himself voluntarily to his own law, he can 
remove the obligation which he has imposed 
upon himself, — and there is the denial of the 
obligation which is asserted. If, on the 
other hand, man is necessarily subject to this 
obligation, whence comes the necessity? 
Not from man himself ; for he can no more 
be his ovna subject than he can be his own 
superior ; he can no more bind himself than 
he can make himself. To assert the con- 
trary is to declare that he is what he is not, 
and is not what he is. Whence comes the 
necessity ? The silence is unbroken by any 
answer: all is mystery. Answer there can 
be none, except in what the theory denies, 
namely in this, that the mil of God imposes 
this necessity upon man, and that this ne- 



THE MORAL BOND 147 

cessity is recognized, because, in virtue of 
the constitution of our being, we spontane- 
ously form judgments of the practical as 
well as of the theoretical order, and find 
from these principles the manifest will of 
the Supreme Director of all things/ 

In practice, the worst feature of Kant's 
theory is the proud exclusion of God and the 
absolute separation of morality from reli- 
gion. Even if one honors and serves God, it 
is not because God so ordains, but because 
man condescends to bind himself to some 
manifestations of homage to a subservient 
Deity. What pride and self-sufficiency! 
If sensualism could be called, as Carlyle 
styled it, ^Hhe philosophy of the pig/' 
Kant's ethical system with its supercilious 
pride might well be termed ^^the philosophy 
of the devil. ' ' 

This tendency of absolutely divorcing mo- 
rality from religion and from God has been 
followed very widely since Kant inaugu- 
rated it. We find it in the systems of Her- 
bart, Ilartmann, Wundt, Paulsen and oth- 
ers; we meet with it in the '^Societies for 

1 Cf. Cath. Encyc. s. v. '*Law," p. 55. 



148 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

Ethical Culture/' which are found through- 
out the land. But to attempt to enforce mo- 
rality without religion or to have any real 
moral system without God, is to try to have 
water mount higher than its source. It 
cannot be done. If, moreover, all men and 
women must be trained in morality and reli- 
gion, as they must, what of the greater ne- 
cessity with regard to the young? Theirs 
is the greater need ; for, as Aristotle wisely 
said, we do not come into this world com- 
pletely made and perfected, but only capable 
of rounding out our powers, physical, intel- 
lectual, and moral. ^ 

Apart from this disastrous tendency to ex- 
clude God from morality, in which respect 
Kant has had many followers, the ethical 
system of the '^philosopher of Konigsberg'' 
has very few adherents. Much more com- 
mon among the champions of '^ independent 
morality" are those who try to explain the 
origin of obligation or duty by experience 
and evolution. Haeckel and Spencer with 
their system of ''moral evolution" are the 
high-priests of this irreligious theory. 

1 Cf . Cath. Encyc. s. v. *'Ethics," p. 560. 



THE MORAL BOND 149 

The many who take this system of moral 
evolution as the smn of knowledge about the 
things of the soul, though its authors deny a 
soul, will hardly deign to discuss the matter 
with those who are opposed to their tenets : 
they plume themselves on being the advo- 
cates of ^^pure science'' and despise those 
who cling to real facts rather than to airy 
assumptions. Owing to the wide spread of 
the poisonous principles of this school it will 
be of considerable advantage to us to exam- 
ine this matter more closely. 

It is not with the origin of the physical 
universe according to the tenets of material- 
istic evolutionists that we have now to do: 
we have already touched upon that suffi- 
ciently. We are to look at their explanation 
of the moral world with its noble and en- 
nobling ideas of devotedness to duty, to 
country, to God. 

All life, they say, is essentially the same. 
It arose from the evolution of the brute 
force of the universe, until through grad- 
ually progressing forms it emerged into 
man ; and it will go on, until from the crush- 
ing of his weaker fellows the ''superman" 



150 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

has appeared, free from all the ills that flesh 
is heir to. And in like manner, they con- 
tinue, from a presocial state where there was 
no law, no morality, no religion, but the an- 
archy of desires riotously followed, there 
grew up a sort of association under stronger 
leaders, as the consciousness of the connec- 
tion between personal good and actions 
which made for the common welfare was 
more and more realized. Fear was the ori- 
gin of all reverence for authority; fear of 
the more savage leaders evolved into respect 
for civil power; fear of the ghosts of de- 
parted ancestors gradually grew into the 
feeling of religious awe. All this was trans- 
mitted by heredity, until finally men no 
longer remembered the cause of their senti- 
ments and called by new names the old 
things forgotten long ago. As Kenan says : 
^^By the force of chimeras they have finally 
managed to get from 'the good gorilla' a sur- 
prising moral effect. ' ' ^ ^ ^ The good gorilla ' ' 
is his name for the man of their theory. 
And Renan's caustic characterization is well 

1 Future of Scimce, p. XVIII. 



THE MORAL BOND 151 

deserved ; for to them man is only a higher 
beast, that has forgotten the blows which 
beat his ancestors into submission and the 
ghosts that made his ignorance cringe in ter- 
ror before the awfulness of the unknown. 

The supreme canon of this moral evolu- 
tion, which is only the blind unfolding of a 
fixed necessity, is to follow the current, to 
obey the law of progress. Whither that 
would lead, it takes no prophet to discern: 
whither it has led those who have bowed 
down before the idol is printed in letters of 
blood and defilement on the scrolls of his- 
tory. I have said that to follow the current 
is the first law of the system. I had better 
call it a counsel; for in the whole theory 
there is no law, except the irresistible on- 
ward march of an unseeing necessity. Still, 
law or counsel, it stands as the basis of a 
provisional morality, changing as all else 
changes in this shifting world. This su- 
preme law or counsel may be specified more 
in detail by the tenuous ''commandments of 
moral evolution." God has given us His 
decalogue: the morality which is divorced 



152 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

from God has its pentalogue with five capi- 
tal invitations gleaming from its siren page. 
What are these conmiandments ? 

To begin with, progress, which is back of 
everything, tends to the increase of life in 
the length and intensity of living; and so, 
the first word to fall from the lips of the idol 
of moral evolution is : Live the largest life. 
This, of course, can have a meaning full of 
lofty truth, just as the Stoic principle, ^'Fol- 
low nature," is a fair-sounding phrase, 
which can contain the truth, but too often 
reeks with deadly poison and bestial defile- 
ment. If to hve the largest life meant so to 
live as to develop the greatest and noblest 
powers of human nature in the exercise of 
the highest prerogatives of man, beginning 
with the hmnble bowing down before the 
God who made him, and going on to the serv- 
ice which leads to uprightness and finally to 
the glorification of nature in the plenitude 
of reward, — it would be a counsel of heav- 
enly worth. But practical, concrete experi- 
ence shows what is meant by those who prate 
about living their own life. It means let- 
ting loose the beast of untamed desires to the 



THE MORAL BOND 153 

ruin of others and the destruction of all that 
is sacred in life. 

For the evolutionists it is pleasure that 
gives life its value ; and since this is so, the 
second counsel is: Enjoy yourself. Why 
not, indeed, if man is only a brute of a higher 
and more complex organization ? if this life 
is the be-all and end-all of existence? An 
easy morality ! And if the sum of pains and 
troubles is greater than the sum of pleasure 
to be wrung out of a predetermined world, 
then in the name of uprightness and moral- 
ity kill yourself. Suicide they do not like to 
call it ; for that has an ugly sound, and ugly 
sounds do not make for pleasure. But to 
make away with oneself, to free oneself, to 
have done with everything, to leave it all, — 
this sounds well enough, and this is the de- 
liberate urging of the prophets of this irre- 
ligion. 

Yet, after all, there are other pleasures be- 
sides those of sense : there are the higher de- 
lights of esthetic and intellectual enjoy- 
ment; and by the third commandment the 
siren voice calls to the quest of these satis- 
factions. With this one need not quarrel, 



154 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

so long as indulgence in such pleasures does 
not contravene the duty to higher things ; so 
long, for instance, as a lover of music does 
not let his wife and children starve, whilst 
he enjovs the luxury of sweet sounds ; so long 
as a litterateur does not suffer his child to 
go dowTL to death or worse, whilst he dalhes 
with the delights of poesy. 

The adherents of moral evolution, how- 
ever, have their advice for this contingency 
in the fifth and last precept of their penta- 
logue. But before we come to that, we must 
note that, since to live the fullest life and to 
enjoy the entirety of pleasure, even of imag- 
ination and mind, the bodily organism must 
be undisturbed by pain, their fourth com- 
mandment is: Take care of your health 
and gTiard the laws of hygiene. Now, once 
again, no blame is to be attached to the effort 
to bestow reasonable care upon the body. 
Xone but the thoughtless and the ignorant 
would deny the desirable results of cleanli- 
ness, even with respect to personal upright- 
ness. But there is an exaggerated cult of 
this body of ours and of its comforts. The 
men in the filth of the trenches are not less 



THE MORAL BOND 155 

men, because for the protection of things of 
higher worth they have been forced to bur- 
row in the earth and to live a life of dirty 
discomfort, which cannot be appreciated by 
those who have looked at their misery only 
from afar. And the sane care of the body 
does not imply, as the system of moral evo- 
lution preaches, that the priest of the reli- 
gion of the future will be the physician and 
that the director of human consciences will 
be the man who heals the human frame. 

Finally, — and now we hearken to their 
clarion call to bestir oneself for the welfare 
of others ! — since the pains and misfortunes 
of others bring discomfort to a man and sour 
the sweetness of his draught of pleasure, one 
is advised to devote himself to others, to re- 
lieve their misery, and to procure for them 
the good things of life. Self-defense and 
self-satisfaction urge to thoughtfulness for 
one's fellows; egotism leads to the outpour- 
ings of altruism. This is their call to self- 
sacrifice ! Many indeed there are who go no 
farther than this in their regard for 
others, — if they go so far. And why should 
they go so far? Why not wrap oneself 



156 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

round with indifference or shield oneself by 
flight from the disgusting sight of the sores 
of Lazarus, from the disagreeable sound of 
the cries of the hungry poor or the wails of 
misery of the down-trodden and the outcast ? 
There is no reason in this system why one 
should not thus harden his heart. Nay, even 
if in a vague philanthropy one does give 
some assistance to others for the warmth of 
self-satisfaction which brings some senti- 
mental pleasure or for the gratif}dng ap- 
plause of one's fellowmen, how different all 
this is from the true ideal of self-sacrifice, 
which has croT^Tied the heads of the great 
ones of mankind mth the aureola of noble 
worth ! 

So, these are the commandments of moral 
evolution. The number of the command- 
ments is cut in two; but morality itself is 
crushed into absolute nothingness. And if 
the advocates of the system are asked for 
some solid reasons to establish so radical a 
position as theirs, they reply by loud reitera- 
tions, not of proofs, but of assumptions, un- 
proved and in most cases unprovable. 

What are these gratuitous assumptions? 



THE MORAL BOND 157 

First, they assume that there is but one force 
in the universe and that this world is not the 
work of a personal Creator. Against this 
assumption we have proved that the self- 
existent personal God is the author of the 
world and reigns as the Lord of the universe. 
And if the saying, ^^ God's in His heaven; 
all's right with the world," does not entirely 
express the whole truth, since there are many 
things that are not right just now, we know 
that God is in His heaven and all will be 
righted in the world, that justice will reign 
and that evil will be conquered, that the all- 
wise and all-good God has a care for the 
work of His hands, and that His providence 
rules all the things that are made. 

In the second place, Spencer and his kind 
assume the spontaneous generation of life 
from non-life as a necessary postulate of 
their theory. Prove it? They have never 
proved it. All the known facts in the wide 
world prove the contrary and show that life 
comes from life alone. Nay, in the light of 
their first assumption which makes God an 
absurdity, even though the one blind force 
in the world, the changing helpless one, 



158 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

could be called the Deity, this spontaneous 
generation would be a manifest impossibil- 
ity. Whether, in view of omnipotent crea- 
tive power, this natural origin of life from 
non-life could ever be proved, is a philo- 
sophical consideration which does not con- 
cern us now. But, from the standpoint of 
materialistic evolution, such a generation is 
a direct violation of the principle of contra- 
diction and of the law of causality. The 
greater does not come forth from the less, 
except when the less has such power given to 
it by what is greater than both. 

Yet, if for no other reason than to escape 
from this contradiction of their position, 
they assume that there is a difference only 
of degree and not of kind between life and 
non-life, between the brute in its insignifi- 
cance and man in the glory of his kingship 
of creation. Has this ever been proved? 
Never. Can it ever be proved? Again, 
never. On the contrary, we have seen how 
man essentially surpasses the brute by the 
spirituality of his soul, whose activities 
grasp the immaterial realities that tran- 
scend the things of sense, and how he goes 



THE MORAL BOND 159 

forward in a conscious, reasoned progress 
distinctive of Ms prowess. 

Another assumption necessary for the 
theory is that the races of men, that are 
called primitive, are altogether immoral and 
irreligious, or at least unmoral and unreli- 
gious. But this too, as we have seen, con- 
tradicts the fundamental religious fact, ac- 
knowledged by the unprejudiced and proved 
more and more by the fair-minded re- 
searches of anthropology. 

Of course, absolute determinism is an- 
other of the foundation-stones of their tem- 
ple of immorality. For them man is not 
free, but is like a straw in a whirlwind or a 
leaf in the rushing waters of Niagara. Is 
this proved ? Far from it : the contrary is 
established by the ethical and psychological 
proofs of man's liberty already considered. 

And the last of the assumptions of the 
system is this, that progress must be per- 
petual. Ever and onward the tide of prog- 
ress must roll; ever and onward must it 
bear the helpless beings on its bosom; ever 
and backward must the shores of weakness 
and ignorance and folly recede before the 



160 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

resistless onrush of advance. But again, 
from the standpoint of materialistic evolu- 
tion, as from the basic position of agnos- 
ticism or of any form of pantheism, this is a 
gratuitous assumption, and is opposed to 
many facts. We indeed admit the great 
progress in the universe. We point with 
glowing pride to man's onward march as 
proof of the splendid spirituality of his soul. 
We can look to the future with tranquil as- 
surance, in spite of the fact that the past 
holds the record of retrogression as well as 
the story of advance. But then, we admit 
the beneficent power of a personal and prov- 
ident Almighty Creator: we know that He 
will bring things right as the days go by, 
and that He will accomplish the degree of 
perfection which He freely decreed when 
He freely chose this world from the millions 
that might have been. Yes, for us contin- 
ued, though limited, progress is a well 
grounded hope. But for one who denies the 
theistic explanation of the world such a hope 
is presumption, and it must wither into de- 
spair, when such a one takes stock of the 
intellectual grounds of his position. 



THE MORAL BOND 161 

Truly the goddess of moral evolution is an 
idol, foul and degrading, and her voice is 
deadly to all who hearken to her. Moral- 
ity ? Why, the solid fact of morality, — and 
it is a fact, vouched for by mankind's uni- 
versal acceptance of the notions of duty and 
responsibility, by the remorse for evil deeds 
and by the consciousness of well-doing, — • 
this fact is contradicted by the theory which 
explains morality by making it an impossi- 
bility. Its watchword, ^^ Enjoy yourself,'' 
leads to debauchery and to the destruction 
of the foundations of social life ; it kills the 
devotedness without which family and State 
must perish. Even if the chimerical dreams 
of the advocates of moral evolution could be 
realized after untold millions of years (and 
they will never be) , on what is the moral life 
of the men and women of today and tomor- 
row to be grounded? On shifting sand, in 
the system of the evolutionists: and when 
the rain falls and the floods come and the 
winds blow, the house will fall and great 
will be the fall thereof.^ 

The system leaves no basis for morality 

1 Cf . Matt. VII, 27. 



162 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

and religion. Why should man worship 
God, when there is no God? Why should 
man's free will be bomid to offer the hom- 
age of the whole man to his Maker, when 
man has no free will and there is no Crea- 
tor ? Why should man be referred to at all 
in the entire investigation, when there is no 
man, but only a ^^good gorilla"? Why, in- 
deed? 

If one can face unmoved the consequences 
of such a theory, not of morality, but of im- 
morality, there is no hope for him. Besides 
the disastrous fact that in this system there 
is no sanction for moralitv, as there is no 
morality, one of the first consequences is the 
glorification of suicide as lawful and lauda- 
ble when the trials of life have outweighed 
its pleasures. Haeckel plainly stands for 
this ; ^ and he is not alone. And again, no 
wonder; for if man is absolute master of 
himself and not responsible to the Lord of 
all for the life which is a sacred trust, why 
not throw it away, if he is tired of it ? And 
going on from one's own life to the life of 
others, the system counsels its votaries to 

1 The Wonders of Life, p. 112. 



THE MOEAL BOND 163 

make away with the weak and helpless, with 
incurables and the hopelessly suffering. 
Haeckel advocates that : ^ so does Spencer : ^ 
so too, though for different reasons, do Re- 
nan and Nietzsche : so do some doctors and 
associations of professional men in our own 
land. And the nightmare grows more grue- 
some; the claims, more blasphemous, until 
success is glorified as morality, until might 
makes right, until man is lifted up to the 
*^bad eminence'' of the ^^ superman" in the 
struggle for existence. 

It is with a feeling of relief, like drawing 
a breath of clean air after being drugged 
with the foul exhalations of pestilential 
poison, that we can turn to the truth. In 
view of what we have seen, it is all so simple, 
yet so sublime ; all so obvious, yet so compre- 
hensive ; all so clear, yet so invigorating to 
the spirit of man. We are seeking an an- 
swer to the question, why man must freely 
express his dependence upon God by the 
profession of religion. We have under- 

1/6., pp. 116, 118-120. 

2 The Study of Sociology, c. XIV, p. 314 ff. Cf. also The 
Man Versus the State, treating of the sins of legislators, esp. 
p. 362 flf. 



164 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

stood that it is quite proper so to do : now 
we are asking why a man is bound to do it. 
The answer comes to this : the natural moral 
law binds man to fulfill the essential order 
which arises from the condition of his being ; 
God is the author of that law, and by His 
will decrees that man's physical condition 
should be the norm of his moral life. Free 
man is and dependent, — that is the way God 
fashioned him; and therefore God's will 
binds him to act out in his life of free effort 
this dependence upon the God who made 
him. 

From the unbeginning depths of eternity 
God's all- wise, all-seeing mind conceived the 
plan according to which He would govern 
the world which He would freely create. 
His will so to rule is the eternal law, by 
which all things are guided to their goal. 
Freely He called creatures into being, and 
began to direct them to that for which He 
made them. The purpose for which all 
things were made was, as we have seen, the 
external glory of God, who could have no 
other object than Himself, since He alone is 
worthy of Himself. So, man too was made 



THE MORAL BOND 165 

for God's glory, for the knowledge and 
praise and reverence and love and service 
of God ; and without his or some intelligent 
creature's existence the magnificent mate- 
rial universe would be without an adequate 
explanation. Man was made for endless 
happiness (a point to which I shall come 
back in the next lecture) , and in the designs 
of God this happiness and God's glory are 
to be* identified. 

Now, to this glory of God, to this magnifi- 
cent end of the recognition and praise and 
love of His manifested excellence, God di- 
rects all things. To say that He does not is 
to utter blasphemy. For, it is to assert 
either that He does not know how to guide 
creatures to their destiny, — and then He is 
not all-wise ; or that He does not care for the 
order that flows from the very nature of the 
things He has made, — and then He is not up- 
rightness and holiness itself ; or that He can- 
not constrain creatures to what He has de- 
creed, — and then He is not omnipotent. In 
any case. He would not be God. Yes, to 
deny this providence of God is to deny the 
very existence of the Most High. 



166 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

But, let it be noted well, God must and 
does guide creatures to their end in accord- 
ance with the nature which He has given 
them. Irrational beings He urges on by the 
compelling tendencies, the impulses and in- 
stincts of their nature, so that they neces- 
sarily follow out the order willed by Him. 
We see the stars and planets in the depths 
of space, each and all forever acting out the 
plan designed by the all-wise Architect of 
the universe, all revolving in the orbits 
traced by Him, all exercising the activities 
given by Him according to the law fixed by 
His almighty will. The plants and the ani- 
mals too go on in the way determined by 
God, all working out the harmony of unity 
in bewildering multiplicity, which is the 
order of His wisdom. 

But man, as rational and free, cannot be 
thus directed to his end by the rigid neces- 
sity of a physical law. His self-determin- 
ing nature, given by God, must be left to 
decide itself ; yet man must work out the de- 
signs of his Lord. This working out of 
God's designs is not a something without 
any compulsion : there is necessity, but it is 



THE MORAL BOND 167 

a moral necessity: man is urged on by the 
force of a law that is moral, not physical. 
In a nature, not distorted by sensual dissipa- 
tion or twisted from its centre by spiritual 
pride, there easily springs up a realization 
of the truth of the existence and the wisdom 
and the holiness and the omnipotence of 
God, who wills the right order of things ; and 
as a consequence man sees this necessity to 
do good and avoid evil imposed upon him by 
the will of his Maker. 

This is more than the recognition that 
some things are good and others are bad. 
Things are good or bad, according as they 
agree with the nature which they perfect or 
are out of joint with that nature, considered 
in its entirety and as including all its rela- 
tions to things that are above it or below it 
or on the same plane as itself. The stand- 
ard of what perfects a nature, the norm of 
what is good with respect to a certain thing, 
is that nature or thing itself. This is so 
clear, that, when we would exhort a man to 
do what is good for him, we are accustomed 
to say: '^Be a man. Don't be a brute: be 
aman.'^ 



168 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

But there is more than this. Nature is 
not the source of the obligation to do what is 
good and to avoid what is bad. That obli- 
gation must come from above. If I say to a 
man: ^^Do not blaspheme; do not steal; do 
not degrade yourself with the vileness of 
lust or the bestiality of intemperance/' and 
he asks me, ^'Why not?" I may say, ^^ Be- 
cause all these things are against the dignity 
of your true nobility of nature.'' And I 
have spoken true ; but I have not answered 
his question. For, I have not told him why 
he must not do what is against the dignity 
of his nature. I cannot urge upon him, that 
it is because he must obey reason ; for to obey 
reason is to obey himself, and to obey him- 
self is a manifest impossibility. I have told 
him how he should act, if he wishes to be a 
real man ; but I have not told him why he is 
bound to be true to his manhood. If he 
should retort, as he might, ^^But what if I 
wish to be less than a man? What if I am 
willing to debase myself beneath the level of 
the brute? Why not?" the reason I have 
given holds no answer to his query. The 
only answer is this : *^ Because to do so is to 



THE MORAL BOND 169 

contravene the will of God Himself : it is to 
offend your Maker: it is to sin: it is to lay 
yourself open to the penalty of retribution 
for your transgression. You may not, be- 
cause the law, the natural moral law, is 
against it ; and, though you can violate this 
law, you should not, nay, you must not; 
God forbids it. ' ' And this is the last answer 
to the question : the case is closed. 

This too is the answer to the question 
about the necessity of professing religion: 
man must serve and worship God because 
God demands it by the undying moral law. 
Do not talk about an irreligious man being 
good. Do not say that a man who does his 
duty to his f ellowmen, but spurns the fulfill- 
ment of his obligation to the Author of his 
being; a man who will not bow down before 
the God who made him; a man who for 
pleasure or avarice or pride refuses to live 
as right reason shows him that God com- 
mands him to live, — do not, I say, tell me 
that such a man is a good man. He is not ; 
for he is guilty of a crime which violates the 
most fundamental duty of his free, but de- 
pendent being. The most sacred obligation 



170 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

of the natural law, which is firm with the im- 
movability of God's sovereignty and of 
man's natural position as a creature of God, 
is that man should praise and reverence and 
love and serve God. 

What is more, if it is once clear, that by 
the voice of revelation God has spoken to 
man to proclaim a truth or to prescribe a 
duty by the positive will of the Creator, then 
by the force of that same law of nature the 
creature is bound to bow down in reverent 
assent to that revelation, to follow out in 
humble and loyal service the commands of 
Him who is above all, yet who rules man out 
of the depths of an unbounded love. 

And so, the chain of evidence is almost 
complete, — that golden chain which binds 
heaven to earth and earth to heaven. Only 
one link remains to be forged ; and to do that 
shall be our task in the following lecture. 
The moral law holds the free will of man to 
the fulfillment of his duty of worshiping 
God. By this bond freedom and necessity 
are reconciled. 

And the exercise of freedom under the 
constraint of this law makes for the greater 



THE MOEAL BOND 171 

exaltation of man. Liberty grows more 
perfect by its use unto righteousness, just as 
it is degraded by yielding to evil. A man 
who rushes along the pathways of passion 
and sin, who denies no craving of his un- 
worthy impulses, who is swept along by the 
full tide of dissipation, may indeed be proud 
enough to boast of his unfettered freedom ; 
but it is all a lie, — and he knows it. He is, 
and he knows that he is, a wretched self- 
made slave. But the man who bows down 
to the law of God, which binds him to the 
sacred order that flows from the very nature 
of things and is ratified by the will of the 
almighty Maker of all, is master of himself 
and is truly free. This we know from the 
right use of our God-given reason: this is 
what the dear Christ told the world during 
the days of His mortal life, when He said: 
'^The truth,'' and all this is the truth, ^^the 
truth shall make you free. . . . Whosoever 
eommitteth sin, is the servant of sin,'' ^ the 
slave of evil. Yes, he who violates the law 
of God, which is meant to link the feebleness 
of man's will to what is high and noble; he 

1 John VIII, 32, 34. 



172 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

who, knowing God, does not worship Him, is 
the most pitiable and abject of slaves: he 
who knows and loves and serves God is free 
with the freedom of the children of God. 



LECTURE VI 

THE SANCTION UNTO EVERLASTING 

Summary of foregoing. Sanction necessary for ef- 
fective law. Universality of notion of sanction. 
Some sanction in this life. Not sufScient. 
Hence complete in future life. Man's soul im- 
mortal. Spurious proofs of spiritualists. Desire 
of perfect happiness. No ^^conditioned immor- 
tality." Heaven and hell sanction as to good and 
evil. Both eternal. No difficulty as to first. 
Eeason defends teaching of revelation as to eter- 
nal retribution. Sufficient sanction: probation 
fixed with life. Objections: God's justice: His 
goodness. ''De profundis" ^^Sursum corda." 

Not only to the one who has labored, but 
even to the passive spectator, there is a cer- 
tain satisfaction that comes with the com- 
pletion of a work. The riveting of the last 
bolt in a massive bridge, the driving of the 
last spike in the track of a great railway are 
occasions for celebration, because they mark 
the conclusion of efforts well and earnestly 
expended. In the days which are now 
hardly more than memories, the village 

173 



174 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

smithy was a place of special interest for 
young and old. To see the forge glow and 
the sparks fly ; to hear the ring of the ham- 
mer on the anvil ; to watch the flowing mus- 
cles of the workers as they bent to their 
task; to note the work grow nearer and 
nearer to the end; to stand by as the last 
link of a huge chain (a ship's anchor-chain 
perhaps) was being fashioned, and to mark 
the last strong stroke that finished all, — that 
was a deep and honest satisfaction worth 
having. 

That deep and honest satisfaction is 
rightly ours. For, we have not only looked 
on whilst a big work was being done; we 
have labored, whilst we prayed, over the mo- 
mentous task that engaged us. We have 
been forging the links of the great chain of 
religious evidence ; we have been fashioning 
the parts of the knowledge touching the 
rights of God and the duties of man. And 
as we give ourselves to the conclusion of our 
task, we can feel the glow of gratification of 
the workman who has labored hard and 
well. But one more link remains to be 
forged; and then the work of proving the 



UNTO EVERLASTING 175 

necessity of man's professing religion is 
ended. After that there is left for all the 
fulfillment of the obligation. 

God exists. He is the cause of all outside 
His own mysterious life, the author of every- 
thing that is not Himself. He made the 
heavens and the earth and all that is therein ; 
in the might of His unbounded dominion He 
rules as the Lord of the universe. Lord of 
man too is He, the Master of the master of 
the material world. To man, the uncrowned 
sovereign of nature, God gave wondrous 
powers; for He made him but "a little less 
than the angels. ' ' He endowed him with a 
soul that is simple and spiritual and free ; a 
soul that is not made of parts, that is intrin- 
sically independent of matter in its opera- 
tions and its existence, that is possessed of 
the marvelous principle of free self-deter- 
mination. But, for all his majestic dignity, 
man is the creature of his Maker; nay, his 
dependence upon that Lord of his is the very 
root-principle of his greatness. Dependent 
he is and free ; and therefore the right order 
of things demands that he should live as a 
freely dependent creature, that is, that he 



176 THE BEDEOCK OF BELIEF 

should freely express in his life the depend- 
ence of his being upon God. 

But besides the appropriateness of such a 
life, there is its obligation : man is bound and 
necessitated to this profession of his subjec- 
tion to God. Not physically coerced is he, as 
are the non-rational creatures of the world 
by the physical laws of nature's God, but 
morally bound by the moral law, which the 
all- wise and all-holy Lord has placed to hold 
the free wilfulness of man to the order which 
is not only heaven's first law, but earth's 
first law as well. Between man's good acts 
and the attainment of man's last end God 
Himself has fixed a necessary connection, as 
none but God Himself could do. Man must 
do good and avoid evil: especially must he 
act out in his life the good of religion and 
avoid the evil of irreligion, because the al- 
mighty will of the great God so commands, 
because the moral law so requires, because 
the bond between heaven and earth so con- 
strains him. 

However, — and this brings us to our pres- 
ent and final consideration, — in order that a 
law be not nugatory, in order that it be ef- 



UNTO EVEELASTING 177 

fective, it is necessary that there should be 
a sanction to urge the obligation of that law. 
Otherwise, the one who is subject to the law 
might ignore and violate it with impunity, 
and obligation would be reduced to a mere 
empty word, to a sound signifying nothing. 
Now, God's moral law over man has its sanc- 
tion, and it is ^'The Sanction Unto Everlast- 
ing.'^ 

To say that a law has a sanction means 
that there are certain rewards established 
for its observance and fixed penalties deter- 
mined for its violation. Ordinarily more 
stress is laid upon punishment for demerit 
than on reward for merit, since as a rule men 
are more powerfully appealed to by the fear 
of incurring physical ills than by the dread 
of losing physical good. They find it easier 
to renounce particular pleasures than to en- 
dure definite pains. And so, in legislation 
touching man the sanction of law usually 
takes on the character of punishment for 
transgression. 

As I have said, the very notion of a real 
law carries with it the idea of sanction. The 
law of God is a real law ; and so, whether we 



178 THE BEDROCK OP BELIEF 

look at the matter from the side of God or 
from the side of man, this divine law must 
have its sanction. 

If, on the one hand, the life of man has 
an undoubted moral value; if his actions 
have a necessary connection with his last end 
(and we have shown that they have, for we 
have proved the existence of the moral law) , 
then only such actions as are good can pos- 
sibly bring man to his last end. Actions 
which are bad must of necessity exclude him 
from the possession of his last end: they 
carry within themselves the sanction against 
their malice. By the infliction of this sanc- 
tion the violated order is repaired; human 
liberty bears the burden of its own choice. 
And this is nothing more than justice. It 
would be the perversion of order, if evil in 
any form could be the principle of the pos- 
session of good. 

From the side of God, on the other hand, 
without this serious will, which urges the ob- 
servance of law by sufficient sanction, the 
very notion of God truly willing man's de- 
pendence, as He must because of His infinite 
rectitude, vanishes into thin air, — the very 



UNTO EVERLASTING 179 

principle of moral obligation disappears, the 
supreme sovereignty of God becomes a farce, 
God dwindles into an insignificant weakling, 
and man is impiously raised to the throne of 
divinity. 

Not many of those who balk at the thought 
of punishment for transgression would find 
fault with reward for well-doing, unless in- 
deed even this ran counter to their ideas 
about the condition of man's life here and 
hereafter. But as for punishment, they are 
forever its declared enemies. Yet they have 
against themselves the united voice of all 
mankind. At the base of all the religious 
systems of the world, which flourished before 
the enlightening ( ?) advent of rationalism, 
is found the recognition of divine punish- 
ment for violations of divine law. This, as 
the pagan Seneca remarked,^ is something 
worthy of serious thought. Egypt, Baby- 
lon, ancient India, Greece, Rome, — all these 
held to the doctrine of the reward or punish- 
ment of the soul, and that too in the life be- 
yond the grave. 

In connection with the sanction of God's 

1 Ad Lucilium, CXVII. 



180 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

law this thought of the future life is of para- 
mount importance. In seriously willing the 
observance of the moral law, as He must se- 
riously will it because of His measureless 
sanctity, God^s infinite wisdom demands a 
sufficient and perfect sanction. He must 
attach to His law such rewards and penalties 
as will so move the will, as not to crush its 
physical freedom. Now, all this means a 
sanction that is sufficient. Anything else 
would imply that God willed the end and did 
not will the means necessary to that end ; and 
that would be the denial of His wisdom. 

As a matter of cold, concrete fact, there is 
not in this life any sufficient sanction for the 
moral law. Some sanction there is, it is 
true. In a limited sense virtue is its own re- 
ward. It brings peace of soul, such as can 
never be known by one who follows the prim- 
rose path of gentle dalliance or rushes along 
rebellious to the requirements of his native 
dignity and falls into the abyss of defilement. 
Sobriety and moderation make for even cor- 
poral well-being. An upright life ordina- 
rily wins the esteem of one's fellows and the 



UNTO EVERLASTING 181 

honor which is due to a good man : it leads to 
domestic joy and social tranquillity. All of 
these are very desirable good things. On 
the other hand, as against a life of scornful 
evil or of wild transgression, there is the 
biting, stinging verdict of the remorse of 
conscience, which sternly condemns the cul- 
prit, unless its voice has been silenced by the 
riotous excesses of dissipation or by the 
blind pride that would justify sin. Often 
too, nature itself strikes in revenge for the 
violation of the law, crowds mad-houses with 
gibbering fools, and fills the graves of earth 
with the wrecks of men and women who 
have dared to disregard its mandates, which 
are the commands of God. 

All this is true ; but it is also true that this 
is not a sufficient sanction for the law of God. 
Rewards and punishments that are adequate 
are not always meted out to men here in this 
life. Only too frequently the unjust op- 
pressor prospers, and the scourge of justice 
does not fall upon him with stinging lash. 
Often the thief escapes detection or is 
shielded in his injustice behind the wall of 



182 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

legality, as distinct from morality. Often 
the good are stricken with suffering and bear 
the burden of crushing sorrow. 

Nay more, the requirements of moral up- 
rightness may demand that a man should lay 
down his life for the sake of duty. Not for 
any fear of death must a fireman or a police- 
man be kept back from fulfilling his obliga- 
tion of protecting his fellow-citizens. A sol- 
dier must front the foe and fight for his 
country even in the face of disaster. A 
priest must not turn aside from the valley 
of the shadows, when there is question of 
bringing the consolations of religion to one 
in need of his ministrations. A martyr, be- 
fore the demands of a persecuting tyrant, 
must forfeit all rather than be untrue to 
God's all-holy rights, and must pour forth 
his life's blood rather than offer incense to a 
false deity. Not only are these men heroes, 
if they stand for what is noble ; not only are 
they cowards, if they do not: if they fail, 
they are sinners and have violated the law of 
the Supreme Lawgiver. Now, it is as clear 
as the sun in heaven, that in this life there 
can be no sanction at all which could nerve a 



UNTO EVERLASTING 183 

man to the fulfillment of his obligation to 
cast away life itself in the discharge of duty- 
It therefore follows mth inevitable neces- 
sity that there must be a sanction in the life 
to come, where all that is left imperfect in 
this mortal span will be made forever right. 
When a man dies, he does not die utterly ; 
he does not sink into the earth and rot and 
live no more. No ; beyond the grave he will 
live on ; for the tomb cannot hold what is no- 
blest and best in him. With its wondrous 
God-given powers his soul will live unto the 
endless ages of eternity. Through the un- 
measured asons that were without beginning 
God existed before the soul was called into 
being; but now that God has created it, as 
long as God shall be God and throughout the 
never-ending duration of a limitless eternity 
the soul shall survive. I am speaking of the 
immortality of the soul of man: I am not 
referring to the resurrection of the body for 
reunion with that soul; nor do I intend to 
enter upon the philosophical discussion, as 
to whether, apart from the positive revela- 
tion of God, it can be proved that the body 
will rise again. In view of our present pur- 



184 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

pose such an inquiry is quite unimportant. 
But the immortality of the soul is a thing 
to which reason itself can unquestionably 
mount with certainty. 

This certainty is not based upon the more 
than doubtful proofs brought forward by 
spiritualism (or better, spiritism) in behalf 
of a life beyond the grave. Much has been 
made of what spiritualists call ^Hhe word 
from the other side.'' But it has not been 
proved that these revelations come from the 
spirits of the dead; and the preponderance 
of evidence points to the fact, that whilst the 
communications come from spirits indeed, 
they come from spirits whose relationship 
with the ^^ prince of darkness'' is more than 
a matter of suspicion. 

The so-called messages would not have ex- 
cited so much attention, had it not been 
for the writings of men eminent in other 
branches of knowledge. Sir Oliver Lodge 
and Sir Conan Doyle have done not a little 
of late to give an impulse to the spiritualistic 
movement ; but their words have found favor 
because of the prominence of the men, and 
not for any intrinsic worth in what they said. 



UNTO EVEELASTING 185 

Sir Oliver Lodge is great in tlie field of phys- 
ical science ; Sir Conan Doyle is expert when 
lie weaves the scientific theories of Sherlock 
Holmes : but both are objects of compassion, 
when they venture into the realm of philoso- 
phy and theology. It is indeed pitiable that 
men of intelligence should be willing to give 
their faith to what is built upon the sand, 
and should refuse credence not only to the 
revelation of God, but to the soundest verdict 
of reason itself. Yet the messages of spirit- 
ualism are opposed both to revelation and to 
reason. 

Though this is a small fault in the eyes 
of an unbeliever, they do contradict revela- 
tion ; for they belie the word of God with ref- 
erence to man, his fall, and redemption, and 
of course they laugh at eternal retribution. 
It is not a valid argumentation for us to turn 
against the spiritualists the truths of revela- 
tion, before we have established revelation. 
But we have a right to answer them in the 
strongest negative, when they declare that 
the spiritualistic cult holds nothing which is 
against the tenets of Christianity. Nothing 
against Christianity in spiritualism ! Why, 



186 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

it gives the lie to the very mission of Christ 
Jesus. 

In the name of pure reason we reject any 
aid which would come from the spiritualists' 
spurious grounds for assent to a life beyond 
the grave ; for they deny the very thing that 
is at the bottom of the great fact of future 
existence, when they reject, as they do, the 
spirituality of the soul. In speaking of 
man's spiritual permanence after death Co- 
nan Doyle says : ^^ Are we to be mere wisps 
of gaseous happiness floating about in the 
empyrean? That seems to be the idea.'' 
That is not the idea ; and anyone but a con- 
firmed materialist, blind to the just and true 
statement of the claims of those who hold to 
the spirituality of man's soul, would out of 
common honesty refrain from such gross 
misrepresentation. ^^But," he continues, 
^^if there is no body like our own" (in the 
disembodied existence of the next life), 
^^and if there is no character like our own, 
then say what they will, we have become ex- 
tinct." ^ He cannot conceive of a spiritual 

1 MeiropoUtcm, Jan., 1918, 



UNTO EVERLASTING 187 

soul. Yet we have seen that tMs spiritual- 
ity is the supreme quality of man's soul. 

In its highest activities the soul can and 
does act without intrinsic dependence upon 
matter : so too it can and does exist without 
intrinsic dependence upon its material con- 
sort : and this is precisely the root-principle 
of its immortality. When the union be- 
tween soul and body has broken down be- 
cause of the body's incapability to continue 
its part in the union, the body is dissolved 
into its elements; but the soul lives on, be- 
cause it is independent of matter and of ma- 
terial requirements. The soul is naturally 
immortal. Not only can it live forever : of 
itself it cannot die. There is no principle of 
dissolution within it, since it is altogether 
immaterial and does not intrinsically de- 
pend on matter for its activity or for its ex- 
istence. 

And as it cannot fail from within, so too is 
it free from the possibility of failing from 
without. Only by annihilation could it thus 
cease to be ; and annihilation, like creation, 
can come only from the will of the infinite 



188 THE BEDROCK OP BELIEF 

God. Yet, — and I say this, not from irrev- 
erence towards the great God, but out of the 
depths of adoring homage for His excel- 
lence, — God Himself cannot annihilate the 
soul of man. Had He made the soul other 
than He has made it, He could of course send 
it back into the depths of nothingness, just 
as He drew it forth from there; but now 
He cannot unmake it, because He has 
pledged His divine word not to do so. And 
how ? By the natural desire, the irrepressi- 
ble longing for perfect happiness, which He 
has placed so deep in the soul that it is part 
of its nature and can never be eradicated. 

To say that man desires perfect happiness 
is to utter a truism. He desires it by a ne- 
cessity of his nature beyond and beneath the 
depths of freedom : he is seeking it in every 
deliberate volition which proceeds from the 
self-determination of his will. This innate 
longing is, in fact, the tap-root of his liberty ; 
it is the fountain-source of every free activ- 
ity. Yet this desire itself is not free : man 
must desire to be perfectly happy. When 
we declare that he longs for this perfect hap- 
piness with a yearning, which as part of his 



UNTO EVERLASTING 189 

nature is the work of his Maker and is 
the pledge of his Creator to the possibility 
of attaining the object of this desire, we are 
only asserting that man must desire that his 
desires be fulfilled; we are only proposing 
under another form the self-evident truth 
that the will is made for good. Now, per- 
fect happiness, besides the element of the 
exclusion of all evil and the possession of all 
good, clamors for the unending duration of 
this blessed state. And so, man's undying 
longing proves that he is made for some ob- 
ject that can satisfy the imperious demands 
of this yearning: it also proves that he is 
made for the everlasting possession of per- 
fect bliss. 

Hence, from a twofold point of view, it is 
clear, that, having made the soul as He did, 
God cannot annihilate it: first, because He 
owes it to His infinite wisdom that, having 
made a being which is capable of immortal- 
ity. He should treat it as He has made it, — 
and without contradicting Himself He can- 
not reduce it to nothingness; and secondly, 
because He owes it to His infinite fidelity 
to His promises to make good the pledge 



190 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

spoken in the depths of the soul in response 
to the longing for perfect happiness and for 
life everlasting. 

The soul's unending existence is no ^^con- 
ditional immortality," such as is advocated 
by White and Drummond and made popular 
by the application to spiritual things of 
the evolutionistic fetish of the survival of 
the fittest. Such a conditional immortality 
v^ould be an extraneous gift, superadded to a 
soul naturally doomed to extinction, and 
given as a reward for its godly living, — a 
convenient doctrine for the denial of eternal 
retribution; whereas by the very nature 
given to it by God the soul is exempt from 
the debt to death and is pledged by God's 
own word to life without end. 

It is by the possession of God in this im- 
mortal life of the human soul that man is 
meant to attain the perfect happiness which 
is the goal towards which he is directed by 
God. But this goal is to be attained freely 
by a free creature through the observance of 
the moral law that binds him. If a man 
freely follows the way traced by God, he will 
come to the joyous term: if he obstinately 



UNTO EVERLASTING 191 

turns aside and will have nothing to do with 
God, he will be excluded from the destiny 
of bliss. The state of happiness we call 
heaven; that of exclusion from joy we name 
hell. Heaven and hell are God's sanction 
upon the observance of the law whereby He 
binds His free creatures to their last end; 
and both are unto everlasting. 

Few are found who would deny the neces- 
sity of eternity for the perfect joy, which 
is the sanction of good, — none, in fact, save 
those whose philosophy is the philosophy of 
the beast and who deny man's life in the be- 
yond. And, from the very notion of the 
perfect happiness to which man aspires, it is 
evident that the reward must be without end 
and without the fear of any such cessation. 

But everlasting retribution as a sanction 
against sin! That is met by some with a 
smile of disdain and with a shriek of angry 
imprecation by others. I have already re- 
ferred to the spiritualists' tenets about an 
eternal hell. Listen to the measured ( !) 
words of Conan Doyle: ''Hell drops out al- 
together, as it has long dropped out of the 
thoughts of every reasonable man. This 



192 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

conception is odious and blasphemous in its 
view of the Creator. . . . Hell as a perma- 
nent place does not exist . . . there is no 
pain beyond/'^ and so forth and so on. 
This attitude of mind is very common now- 
adays. And mark it well, this position does 
not merely maintain that reason does not 
conclusively prove an eternal hell. It go'es 
farther and boldly asserts, that, no matter 
what anyone says, no matter what revela- 
tion declares, there simply is no hell. That 
places these men in the position of attackers 
of what they call ^^an old fashioned notion,'^ 
and lays the burden of proof on them. In 
reply to them it is quite enough to show that 
their reasons do not prove what they start 
out to prove, and they are crushed beneath 
the weight of proof which falls upon them. 

We do not assert that reason alone can 
prove with utter finality all that the revela- 
tion of God has told us about the place of 
fearful retribution. Reason tells us noth- 
ing about the nature of the punishment of 
the hereafter beyond the fact, that it will be 
the exclusion from bliss and that it will be 

1 Metropolitcm, Jan., 1918. 



UNTO EVERLASTING 193 

retribution. But reason does show us how 
rational is faith in God's revelation, which 
lights up the terrible blackness of the dun- 
geon of His wrath ; reason does defend this 
revelation against the groundless attacks of 
the impugners of the word of God; reason 
does give powerful arguments to show that 
the sanction of punishment is eternal. 

In connection with this last point it is well 
to remark that the notion of complete and 
sufficient sanction fails, if it is not eternal; 
for nothing short of this can hold men in the 
face of the seduction and violence of tempta- 
tions. As St. Basil said, the mere idea of a 
limit in the chastisement authorizes all sorts 
of audacity against the Lord of all. And St. 
Jerome was right when he declared: ^^ Im- 
agine as many years as you please and dou- 
ble the lapse of the longest time ; nay, in the 
count of years add uncounted ages, heaped 
with torment : if the end of all is the same, 
what is past is considered as nothing ; for we 
do not ask what we may have been at any 
time, but what we shall be forever.'' ^ 

Again, reason tells us most certainly that, 

1 In Jonam, c. III. 



194 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

whatever may be said of the eternity of the 
punishment^ the retribution must at least be 
final. For, ^'by the order of nature and 
good consequence, the man who has aban- 
doned God, goes without God; and he who 
has shunned his last end and final good, ar- 
rives not at it; and he who would not go 
when invited to the feast, eats not of the 
same ; and whoso has v^thdrawn from God, 
from him God withdraws.''^ Yes, reason 
shows this; but it shows more. For if, on 
the one hand, the soul is immortal, and if, on 
the other, the period of trial is fixed with 
this life, then the retribution must be eter- 
nal. Now, we have seen that the soul can- 
not die and that God has pledged Himself 
that it shall not be annihilated, but shall live 
forever. But is the term of trial fixed with 
this life? From God's revelation we know 
that it is; but what of the voice of reason 
alone ? Does reason exclude the possibility 
of another trial after the days of earth 
have passed ? Perhaps not ; but everything 
points that way, since death is the end of this 
life, and unless this is the term and unless 

1 Rickaby, Moral Philoso'p'hy, p. 163. 



UNTO EVERLASTING 195 

the trial cannot go over into another stage 
of existence, it is hard to see where the per- 
fect sanction of this life is to be found. 

In any case, however, there must surely be 
some limit to trials ; for man's end is an end, 
and precludes the very notion of unending 
probations. And if, when the series of pro- 
bations is past, the soul is still opposed to 
God, hardened in its dogged clinging to evil, 
then the unending future of pain must be 
faced. Otherwise one denies the wisdom 
and justice and sanctity of God, who cannot 
take to the embrace of His love the ingrate 
and the rebel and the traitor. If every soul 
simply will and must come to God in spite 
of all the depths of possible malice within it, 
the attainment of man's end would not be 
free ; only the quicker or slower attainment 
would lie within the field of the soul's activ- 
ity. 

Another consideration that points to this 
life as the term of probation is given by St. 
Thomas. He repeatedly points out,^ that 
owing to its spiritual character, by which 
after it is separated from the body it ap- 

1 Cf. Vonier, The Human Soul, c. XXX. 



196 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

proximates the manner of action of a pure 
spirit, the soul in its disembodied state is 
incapable of change. As a spirit cannot 
alter its judgment, so too its will, once fixed 
by itself whether for good or evil, must re- 
main forever determined in its volition. 
Still, I do not press this point; for it is a 
theory which is deduced after the knowledge 
of the fact has come from divine revelation. 
Nor is it necessary to press the point. 
Even if it be admitted that the disembodied 
soul is not quite like a pure spirit, since it is 
not a pure spirit ; even if it be granted that 
God could give the soul other chances in the 
world to come, if He so willed, the truth 
is still unchanged. The giving of other 
chances in a future existence would depend 
upon God's free choice; and the free choice 
of God can be known only from God's reve- 
lation of Himself. If, then, reason could 
not definitely deny that there is a chance 
after death, neither could it affirm that there 
is. Nothing but God's revelation could set- 
tle the matter beyond the reach of all doubt. 
Now, that revelation has told us that God 
has fixed this life as the term of trial and 



UNTO EVERLASTING 197 

that the sanction of retribution is eternal. 
And reason can defend this revelation from 
the attacks of rationalists and sentimental- 
ists of whatever kind. 

As I have said, the burden of proof lies on 
those who in the name of reason deny an 
eternal hell. If they were satisfied with the 
assertion, that reason alone does not prove 
beyond the possibility of any doubt the abso- 
lutely unending character of the sanction of 
pain, one need not find serious fault with 
their contention, though reason does point 
the other way. But when they say without 
qualification that there is no hell, that noth- 
ing proves it, that it is a disgrace to reason 
and a blasphemy against God to speak of 
it, — then they must advance reasons that 
will support the charge. And they cannot. 

There is nothing against the justice of 
God in this eternal punishment of sin : on the 
contrary it is part of God's justice to de- 
mand this penalty. It is sheer folly to re- 
ject this punishment because the offence 
which merits it is committed in a short space 
of time, perhaps in the twinkling of an eye. 
The duration of the sinful act makes no dif- 



198 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

f erence even in the sanction of human legis- 
lation. It may take but an instant to per- 
petrate murder most foul ; yet the just pen- 
alty is the irreparable pain of death or the 
seemingly endless years of heart-tearing 
confinement. It may require but a few mo- 
ments to play the detestable part of a traitor 
to one's country in the time of war; but the 
righteous punishment for the culprit is to 
face the firing-squad or to endure the igno- 
minious fate of hanging. And so too with 
regard to sin against God, it may be short- 
lived ; yet its punishment is measured, not by 
the duration of the act, but by its malice. 

Moreover, though the act of sin is passing, 
the state of sin endures. The soul remains 
turned away from God, blasted with the hor- 
ror of enmity against its Maker, so long as 
it does not retract its evil deed and avail it- 
self of the conditions of pardon, which the 
offended God may have prescribed. Now, 
the reprobate soul, having reached the term 
of probation and having fijced its unalterable 
condition, is forever petrified in evil, is for- 
ever hating the holiness and majesty of the 
infinite Godhead, is forever hurling its cry 



UNTO EVERLASTING 199 

of impotent defiance in the face of the Al- 
mighty. And its pride must be forever put 
down. 

This is the first and essential purpose of 
punishment, — to restore violated order, to 
make that order, imposed on all creatures by 
the sovereignty of God, prevail against the 
upstart who dares to disturb it. Sentimen- 
talists may prate about correction of the of- 
fender being the object of punishment actu- 
ally infiicted. In the case of any law this is 
but a secondary end, as is also the deterring 
of others from the way of evil in so far as 
may be. But the primary and essential end 
of penalty is the restoration of order, the 
vindication of the law^s sovereignty. So 
too is it here. Man has risen up against the 
divine order: this divine order rises up 
against him and crushes him. Man has re- 
fused to acknowledge the sovereignty of 
God: that sovereignty must be vindicated, 
unless the puny creature is to triumph over 
God's dominion. Man would not glorify 
God with the free service which would lead 
to the perfect happiness of the possession of 
God: he is forced in unwilling punishment 



200 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

to glorify the sanctity and justice which he 
scorned. 

If some cannot see the justice of the pen- 
alty, it is largely because they think lightly 
of sin and slight the supreme majesty of the 
infinite God. Sin is not a mere peccadillo : 
it is a hideous crime. It is disobedience and 
rebellion against the Most High. It is turn- 
ing against Him the very gifts of His un- 
bounded love. It is placing one's supreme 
happiness in a creature, and as such is equiv- 
alent idolatry. It is practically to strive to 
withdraw oneself from the dominion of God, 
and that could be done only by destroying 
Him. So, the sinner would reach up to the 
eternal God and would drag the Almighty 
from His everlasting throne. No wonder 
God hates sin ; no wonder He smites it with 
the thunderbolts of His wrath, when it 
stands before Him unrelenting and unre- 
pentant. 

But what of God's goodness? How can 
that be reconciled with this terrible punish- 
ment, the thought of which has overwhelmed 
even the saints of God? Let us be candid, 
and admit that the human mind cannot en- 



UNTO EVERLASTING 201 

tirely solve this mystery of God's justice 
and His goodness, any more than it can com- 
pletely explain the problem of His unchang- 
ing eternity and His freedom, any more than 
it can fully grasp the real inwardness of the 
uncaused being of the Godhead. But this is 
no ground for the slightest doubt about the 
fact which He has placed before us in His 
revelation, the fact to which reason itself 
points. 

To seek an answer as to how God in His 
goodness can punish so severely is to mis- 
construe the whole question. It is not God's 
goodness as such which inflicts the penalty 
of hell upon the reprobate, as, for that mat- 
ter, it is not His goodness as such which in- 
flicts any punishment however slight. No ; 
it is not God's goodness as such that pun- 
ishes : it is His justice. 

His merciful goodness with its long-suf- 
fering love has shown itself all through the 
sinner's life; it has given and forgiven; it 
has followed and called and yearned and 
urged (and, as revelation tells us, has died 
for man) , that the work of sin might be un- 
done. But the obdurate sinner would have 



202 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

none of God and His love ; he clung to evil, 
and now it is his ; he preferred the creature 
to the Creator, and when the bolt of death 
fell, he had himself closed the gates to divine 
mercy and goodness, and nothing but inex- 
orable justice remained for the self -damned 
wretch. 

As God's goodness is not the reason why 
He punishes, neither is this goodness any 
reason why His justice should not punish. 
God is infinitely good; but He is infinitely 
just. His justice is good and BQs goodness 
is just. Yes, God is all-goodness and all- 
love; and for this very reason, by a neces- 
sity of His being He loves His own infinite 
excellence. His sanctity, His sovereignty. 
His justice; and these He must defend 
against the heinous injuries and the final 
proud impunity of perverse human wills. 
Were it otherwise, the creature would have 
the last word in the revolt against the Crea- 
tor, and irreparable disorder would be the 
law. 

The infliction of penalty at the hands of 
God is not the outcome of barbarous and sav- 
age gloating over pain. It is the effect of 



UNTO EVERLASTING 203 

the supreme goodness, which would love 
nothing at all, if it did not first and foremost 
cleave to His own illimitable and unspeak- 
able loveliness and infinite excellence. God 
would not be good, if He did not love Him- 
self infinitely ; and He would not love Him- 
self, if He did not love His justice, and if 
He did not hate with an undying and un- 
bounded hatred the monstrous evil of sin, 
which is radically opposed to His very Be- 
ing. 

There, then, the last link is forged, and our 
task is done. In the light of reason, upright 
and sincere and humble, we have seen how 
God stands in this world of His. God is: 
He is the uncaused, self-existent, supreme 
Being, the source of all and the end thereof : 
He is the Master, and man is His servant in 
absolute dependence. In this dependence 
man is still the monarch of things here below, 
glorified with the majesty of a soul that is 
spiritual and free and immortal. And here 
is the reason of religion: God is God, and 
man in his freedom is the creature. Hence, 
order demands that man express this de- 
pendence in his life by freely glorifying and 



204 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

worshiping his Maker. To this worship, 
which right reason reveals as the appropri- 
ate thing, man is constrained by the moral 
law, which is the will of God binding the will 
of man, and which has a sanction unto ever- 
lasting. 

Therefore, man is bound to profess reli- 
gion. Nay more, if God should make any 
revelation, man must accept it; if God 
should declare that He demands any partic- 
ular form of worship, man is bound to ren- 
der it. To refuse is to deny God's wisdom 
or truthfulness or sovereignty, and that is to 
deny His very existence. The foundation 
of religion in general, then, is the firm sup- 
port of the temple of Christianity ; and that 
temple of Christianity is the tabernacle of 
God with men, the one holy Catholic Church. 

But a few moments ago we stood in awe 
and fear before the terrible sanction of the 
law as it faces evil; and that sanction will 
surely fall on the man who persistently turns 
his back upon God in the pride of irreligion. 
From the depths let us lift up our souls. 
^^De profundis" ^^Sursum corda!" Let us 
close our considerations with the vision of 



UNTO EVERLASTING 205 

the glory of the reward, which is the part 
of the sanction, where by the side of justice 
and sanctity God's goodness has its full and 
unbounded sway. 

The heaven of nature would be a some- 
thing more thrilling than we can quite real- 
ize. Never to know a pang of sorrow, never 
a pain or a doubt or a misgiving; never to 
experience the stab of separation from loved 
ones ; never to fear the possibility of falling 
away from God through the weakness of a 
faltering will: and besides all this, to have 
the fulness of joys to satisfy every longing in 
the throbbing ecstasy of blessedness ; always 
unto everlasting to hold God by the powers 
of mind and will, — ^truly even this is more 
than we can appreciate. 

But when the further promise is spoken 
by the voice of God and we are told of the in- 
tuitive vision of God, face to face and heart 
to heart with Him forever, pulsing with the 
knowledge and the love and the life of God 
Himself, — ^we cannot understand. No, ' ' eye 
hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it 
entered into the heart of man, what things 
God hath prepared for them that love 



206 THE BEDROCK OF BELIEF 

Him."^ That assuredly is a supernatural 
sanction worthy of the infinite Lover of 
mankind. 

If its very thought is so overwhelming, 
what will the reality be, when the veil is 
drawn aside and we are face to face with 
Him! The sacredness of it all is like the 
glorious sun of an eternal Easter day, light- 
ing up the hills of life and the valleys where 
perchance we have walked through the shad- 
ows of a veritable Passion. Truly '^the 
sufferings of this time are not worthy to be 
compared with the glory to come, that shall 
be revealed in us'^;^ ^'for that which is at 
present momentary and light of our tribula- 
tion, worketh for us above measure exceed- 
ingly an eternal weight of glory.'' ^ God 
grant that it come to all of us ! 

IT Cor. ir, 9. 3 11 Cor. IV, 17. 

2 Rom. VIII, 18. 



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